The EAX1300Pro was an unpleasant piece of hardware that suffered from terrible artefacts when it was under load. While its test results don’t look too shoddy it is completely beyond the pale when it comes to gaming. The 7300GT had the edge on the X1550 in all of our tests but the difference wasn’t too noticeable on screen. You can use either graphics cards to play intensive games such as Far Cry and FEAR with good quality and at decent resolution, and there is no doubt that both cards fully support Windows Vista Premium.
3DMark06
We found that the X1550 could be overclocked from 550/800MHz to 640/920MHz which boosted performance by 15 per cent. At 650/936MHz the image quality deteriorated. The 7300GT could be overclocked to raise performance by ten per cent so the gap is somewhat narrower than it appears however the 7300GT remains the faster of the two chips.
Far Cry
The Sapphire X1300 XT with DDR 3 memory that we mentioned earlier was tested some time ago on a different test PC so we haven’t included the test results. However, one figure jumps off the page: the 3DMark06 score of 2,529. That eclipses either of these DDR 2 cards, so the key point about the X1550 is that it delivers satisfactory performance at an incredibly low price. If you were choosing a graphics card for gaming then it’s a safe bet that you would choose neither of these options, but that misses the point entirely. On this showing the Radeon X1550 is the cheapest proper graphics card that money can buy, and for the time being Sapphire and AMD can consider it’s a job well done.
F.E.A.R.
Verdict
Sapphire has done a fine job delivering a DirectX 9.0c graphics card for £45 and the fact of the matter is that the Radeon X1550 is far more relevant to the man in the street than the long-awaited R600 will ever manage.
Sapphire Radeon X1550 graphics card
COMMENTS
Re: Power Requirements
I just got this card from Newegg. It does require a power connector and it comes with a cable to tie into your hard drive power if you do not have a spare molex. I have mine in an old Shuttle SK43G with a 200w PSU. Easy install, no problems. Sure beats onboard video. Noisy fan though, runs at full speed all the time.
Power requirements
Does anyone know the power requirements of this agp graphics card, does it require a separate connector, and will a 240w psu be enough ?
A lack of scale
I have a problem with this review: three cards were run through their paces and their responses plotted on three separate graphs for us to compare the results... but the three graphs used THREE SEPARATE SCALES.
What's the point of presenting the data in graphical formats (graphs) if you structure them so that the scales don't match anyway? Simply give us the numbers in a table, it would achive the same result and not make it look (at first glance) like the cheap-ass card outdid the more expensive cards.
X1300 good for only one thing
I bought an X1300, 512MB DDR2, for $120 Canadian. Every review I read suggested the card was a piece of crap; but it had one selling feature. The card I bought was to update my old intel gaming box (D865P) which has an AGP slot. The box now serves as a multimedia box running XP pro sp2. The card serves well enough on old hardware.I still have a couple of UT games and Quake4 on the box and they run OK. The biggest drawback is that since the card was installed my XP OS is dying the death of a thousand cuts and I'll probably have to do a clean install.
My experience and reading leads me to recommend staying away from anything touched by the X1300 series unless, like me, you want to light a fire in an old AGP slot.
