Labs

At this low price point, performance is often less important than features, and the X1300 Pro offers plenty in the latter respect.

This card from HIS is immediately striking thanks to the huge IceQ cooler, which is longer than the card itself. But if you have the space, this heatsink houses the quietest fan of the whole group. And unlike passive coolers, it won't

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leave all the resulting heat inside the case. Unfortunately, it's so tall the card takes up two backplates, which rules it out for many media centres and small-form-factor systems.

But there are more features to add to the appeal: HIS includes a good bundle including Dungeon Siege and an S-Video cable, as well as composite and component adapters. ATi's X1000 series cards all have at least one dual-link DVI connector, so high-resolution displays are no problem, and the X1300 cards also have a D-SUB port.

The Excalibur returned 25fps and 21fps in Call of Duty 2 and Far Cry respectively, so with a few tweaks to quality settings you should see smooth gameplay at 1,024 x 768.

But this isn't a gamer's card, and even when considered as a media-centre card it can't compete with the 7600 GS at this price. ATi's image quality is slightly superior, so this card does have its strengths, but not enough to recommend it over Nvidia's low-cost rival.