PowerColor Radeon X1300 HyperMemory 2
The review sample was supplied in 'white-box' form. So no box shots or bundle pics I'm afraid, but you do get the board, S-Video cable, driver CD and a decent manual in the box, along with a DVD containing some Cyberlink media processing and playing software. Here's the board itself.
Occupying a half-height PCB with detachable VGA output, the PowerColor Radeon X1300 HyperMemory 2 is suitable for low-profile systems. The angle of the shot suggests the heatsink protudes higher than the top edge of the board, but that's not the case in reality.
Two DRAMs sit on the front, two sit on the back. Hynix get the call-up for memory duties. DDR2, 2.5ns refresh and 32MiB each, they're run at their maximum 400MHz rated speed and they connect to the RV515 GPU via an aforementioned 64-bit memory bus.
Incase you're not 100% sure what RV515 is, and therefore what the PowerColor Radeon X1300 HyperMemory 2 supports, it's a DirectX Shader Model 3.0 compliant implementation meaning it can support the rendering techniques of any of the latest games.
For those interested in the inner working of the pixel shader core, ATI's latest generation 'Ultra-Threaded' architecture keeps 128 fragment threads active at any one time on RV515, each managing a 4-deep queue of four fragments (so 16 fragments per thread). The small batch size keeps branching penalties low, and helps to maximise the use of the hardware by active threads.
You can see VGA, S-Video output and DVI-I present on the board's backplane, and while the GPU supports dual-link output on that port, PowerColor don't enable the ability on this SKU (and you can understand why, hopefully!).
Noise and Thermals
What noise and thermals? The cooler on the board barely registers a whisper to my deaf old ears with SPL measurement backing that up. Even at 600MHz, RV515 doesn't seem to generate heat output that requires anything more than the simple aluminium cooler you can see above.From a heat and noise point of view, the PowerColor Radeon X1300 HyperMemory 2 is a total winner.
