First of all, thanks a lot to HIS for giving us the opportunity to review this video card!

About HIS

HIS is a graphics card company that primarily builds ATI-based products. They are a Christian company as well. This is part of their company statement: HIS was established in 1987 with the mission to produce the highest quality graphic cards in the industry. Besides strong devotion to excellent products and services, HIS has been conducting business with the aim to "Glorifying God". Honesty and integrity are the two key principals of how HIS are conducted. Ethical business practice has been an everyday commitment to our clients, vendors, and investors. Most of us pick a video card based purely on chipset and price. It\'s good to see HIS is more than a typical ATI card manufacturer - they have a mission that CCGR can agree with. Even so, this review is based on the quality of the product reviewed; no unnecessary bias has gone into the review process. HIS unveils the HIS X1300 512MB HyperMemory PCIe x1 card, which is the world’s first PCIe x1 solution on ATI’s X1K family of products. HIS X1300 512MB HyperMemory PCIe x1 creates multi-monitor applications and upgrade possibilities for your PC. The HIS X1300 512MB HyperMemory PCIe x1 brings advanced SM 3.0 and AVIVO capabilities in a low profile design, promising the best video, the best office and the best multimedia experience to PC users. Combining a radically new and efficient 3D shader-core architecture and HyperMemory II by ATI, which dynamically assigns system memory to achieve the performance and operability of a 512/256MB configuration. The HIS iFan operates as quietly as 20dB, and its durable performance extends the card’s service life.

Key ATI/ HIS X1300 512MB HyperMemory PCIe x1 Specifications

· Powered by ATI Radeon X1300 - 450MHz · 128MB-64bit 4 channel DDR2 memory - 500MHz · 4 Pixel shader processor · 2 Vertex shader processor · 4 Geometry Pipelines · Ultra-threaded SM 3.0 Engine · Advanced memory controller · ATI Avivo · High Precision Architecture · PCI Express® x1 lane This is a great card for having multiple monitors as it supports both VGA and DVI connections. It has 128MB onboard memory and the hyper memory is its ability to borrow up to 512MB from the system if needed. The 128MB is 64-bit wide, which cripples its performance. This is a good card for Audio/Video and office use. It can do gaming but, as shown below, it’s definitely not recommended especially at high resolutions.

The competition

In this review, we are comparing this video card to the HIS X1300 Dual DVI 512MB card, with a 128bit wide onboard memory using a PCIe x16 interface.

Key ATI/HIS X1300 Specifications

· 450MHz GPU core clock · 500MHz DDR2 RAM · 4 Pixel Shader Processors (approx. equivalent to 4-pixel rendering pipelines) · 2 Vertex Shader Processors · 512MB of 128-bit wide DDR2 RAM · Pixel Shader Model 3.0 support · ATI Avivo video playback technology It’s basically the same as above, with the exception of the quantity and bandwidth of the RAM, as well as the PCIe x1 interface verses the x16 interface on this one.

Benchmark System Specifications

For our PCI-Express reviews, we have a fairly high-end system available, so direct comparisons to the AGP reviews of similar video cards are not fair. Nevertheless, it should make fairly clear where the GPU limitations are, since we are not CPU bound here. · AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ CPU (2.2GHz) · ASUS K8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard, using the NVIDIA NForce 4 SLI Chipset · 2GB of DDR400 RAM, Dual-Channel, CAS 2.5, 1T command rate · 160GB Seagate 7200RPM Hard Drive with 8MB Cache · Creative SoundBlaster Audigy · Onboard ethernet · Windows XP Pro Windows XP was installed with Service Pack 2 slipstreamed in. No other Microsoft updates were installed. There was no anti-virus software or anything of that nature installed. The driver versions were as follows: · NVIDIA NForce 4 AMD Edition drivers, ver. 6.70 · For the ATI cards: Catalyst 6.04

Games Benchmarked and Setup

· 3DMark06 · AquaMark 3 · Far Cry 1.33 · Half-Life 2 (current Steam version) · Quake 4 1.0 · Unreal Tournament 2004 ver. 3369 All games and benchmarks were run at the resolution of 1280x1024, except for Aquamark3 which is set to 1024x768 and cannot be changed. Far Cry, Half-Life 2, and Quake 4 were benchmarked using the HardwareOC BenchTools. UT2004 was benchmarked using UMark. Far Cry used the PC Games Hardware Demo, Half-Life 2 was benchmarked with the Anti-Citizen map, Quake 4 used the Guru3D demo, and UT2004 was tested with ONS-FrostBite.

Benchmark Results

With a 3dmark06 score of 440 that should be a strong indicator that this card is not designed for gaming. UT2004 is about three years old. 16-17FPS is not that good, I would recommend running this game at lower resolutions for better performance. This benchmark was unbearable to watch. It literally was a slideshow. This is the best score that this card has had. It just goes to show that the HL2 engine runs well on ATI cards. Again this game is older and would be playable at lower resolutions.

Multi-Monitor Setup

When it came to the multi-monitor test I was only able to have my 6800GS and the PCIe x1 HIS X1300 in at the same time. Multi-monitor would probably work a lot better if both of the cards/drivers in question were from the same vendor. ATI does not play well with the NVIDIA drivers. When the ATI card was my primary display it only let the NVIDIA card to multi-monitor with 16 colors. When the NVIDIA was the primary card, the ATI card could have 2 monitors but the NVIDIA card could only use one primary interface. The color depth was fine but losing my other connector/monitor was not good. So the maximum amount of monitors I could have was 3. If both cards were ATI I probably would have been able to do 4 with no problems.

Final Thoughts

This card is not designed for gaming but it can do 3D. It’s designed to fit in low profile systems or machines with little upgrade potential by fitting into the PCIe x1 slot. It can also fit in a PCIe x16 slot if you desire. The onboard memory is only 64bit so that hurts the performance significantly. The HyperMemory concept is good if your system has memory to spare, however it’s designed to allow applications with high memory desires to run, though not necessarily well. I would recommend using this on a PC with at least 1GB of RAM. If you only have 512MB I would not recommend using this card for anything requiring 3D graphics. This would be a good card to use for office environments.