Not everyone is in the financial position to purchase a top of the range graphics card and chances are if you’ve clicked the link to read this article you are one of those people. Both ATI and Nvidia have begun to take a different approach to the cards aimed at this sector, whilst all previous low end cards came with similar volumes of memory to the mainstream and high end cards there are now cards which come with enough video memory for basic tasks and when needed share some of your system memory.

The X300 Hypermemory

The Radeon X300 SE with hypermemory is a 32mb card which comes clocked at 324mhz core and 297mhz memory. As far as pipeline configuration goes this card has 4 pixel pipelines (with 2 vertex shaders) running on the 0.11micron RV370 core and transmits information to and from the memory over a 64bit bus.

The card itself is very compact, which is great if you have a SFF PC such as a Shuttle available. Cooling is passive only and core only, again a benefit if you are using a SFF PC, specifically a media centre when silence is golden.

The rear of the card contains no memory chips or video processors commonly seen on higher specification radeon hardware.

On the connectivity side of things we have two video outputs one VGA and one S-Video.

 

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