PowerColor X300 SE: Noise, Overclocking and 2D Quality

The noise parameter is completely out of place when we’re talking about the PowerColor X300 SE – the card is equipped with a passive cooling system and is always absolutely silent.

We could only speed the GPU up (from 325 to 400MHz) in our overclocking tests. Of course, we applied additional cooling – the heatsink was scorching hot even at the regular frequency. So, our supposition of a low heat dissipation of the X300 was never confirmed. Well, the X300 is a much more complex chip than the RV280 (RADEON 9200) and works at a higher frequency, and even the thinner tech process cannot compensate for that. The passive heatsink is anyway enough for the graphics card when it’s at its normal frequencies; additional cooling is only necessary for overclocking.

The memory wouldn’t be stable even at 210 (420DDR) MHz, the card hanging up in 3DMark03. The high access time and the simplified PCB deign must have led to this poor result.

The 2D image as outputted by the card was crisp in all resolutions up to 1600x1200@75Hz inclusive. The PowerColor X300 SE is of course unlikely to be used with monitors that support such a high resolution, but it wouldn’t disappoint you in this case anyway.

Testbed and Methods

We investigated the performance of the RADEON X300 SE on our new testbed configured as follows:

• Intel Pentium 4 560 CPU (Socket 775, 3.60GHz, 1MB L2 cache);
• Intel Desktop Board D925CXC;
• 1GB DDR2 PC2-4300 (533MHz) SDRAM (Micron Technology, 2x512MB);
• Samsung SpinPoint SP0812C (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card;
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0ñ;
• ATI CATALYST 4.8, NVIDIA ForceWare 61.77 (CATALYST 4.6 and ForceWare 60.85 for 3DMark).

This configuration can’t be called an “inexpensive” one, but our aim is to provide the general picture of the performance of the simplest PCI Express graphics card now available in the market. We used the following games and applications in our tests:

First Person 3D Shooters:

• Call of Duty;
• Doom 3;
• Unreal Tournament 2004;
• Halo: Combat Evolved;
• Far Cry;
• Painkiller;
• Highly Anticipated DirectX 9 Game 1;
• Highly Anticipated DirectX 9 Game 2.

Third Person 3D Shooters:

• Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow;
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time;
• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

Simulators:

• IL-2 Sturmovik: Aces in the Sky;
• Lock On;
• Colin McRae Rally 04;

Strategy:

• Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour;
• Perimeter.

Semi-synthetic benchmarks:

• Aquamark3.

Synthetic benchmarks:

• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 340.

The highest graphics quality settings were selected in each particular application. The rendering quality was set up identically for ATI’s and NVIDIA’s GPUs through the drivers; we enabled anisotropic and tri-linear filtering optimizations in NVIDIA’s GPUs. Due to the overall low performance of the PowerColor X300 SE and its orientation toward the budget market, we adjusted our testing methodology accordingly and excluded some display resolutions and modes for certain games.