After last week's review of the BFG 7800GTX OC we visit the opposite end of the video card spectrum with Sapphire's X1300 Pro. Sapphire seems to have really focused on making their offering of the X1300 extremely affordable by being cheapest X1300 available. At the time of writing this card can be found online for $95. In other words, this video card costs less than 20% of what the 7800GTX is currently selling for. That's quite a statement. However, a graphic card has to perform to provide any real value to someone. A cheap video card that doesn't run the games they want play doesn't do much good either. So is this card worth its $95 price tag or is it a very effective paper weight? That's what we will determine in our review of Sapphire's X1300 Pro video card.

Specifications:

Of course being a part of the X1K line of graphics cards means that this X1300 runs on all of the latest graphic technologies including a 90nm TSMC process and Shader Model 3.0 support. The X1K cards also feature ATI's new Advanced Imaging and Video (Avivo) technology which aims to improve visual quality across many spectrums of video and image processing. It also prepares for the future H.264 (High Definition) format by accelerating decoding and transcoding (the process of converting from one file format to another) process by taking some of the load off of the CPU.