When researching a graphics card it’s pretty easy to search Google for reviews on the latest and greatest graphics cards such as NVIDIA’s 7900GTX and ATI’s X1900XT cards. Heck, even the mid-range X1600XT and 7600GT or any card that touts gaming excellent gaming performance gets plenty of coverage. Despite what review sites cover, there is a market for low end graphics cards—which typically don’t receive as much fanfare as the latest and greatest products. It’s a shame that low end graphics cards don’t get much coverage even though they’re what customers typically buy when they walk into a store asking for a graphics card. These customers don’t care much about gaming performance and whatever little gaming performance the cards can do will keep their kids content for the time being.

In addition to the low end graphics customer, low end graphics cards are also excellent solutions for home theater PC’s which are typically don’t require much 3D performance aside from DirectX9 support for rendering fancy GUIs. Unlike high end graphics cards which have two contenders, ATI and NVIDIA, the low end sector has the addition of long time graphics manufacturer S3. As the low end is filled with various configurations of the same low end GPU, we’ll be narrowing things down to three low end graphics cards. The cards we’ll be looking at are all sub-$100 cards and include Gigabyte’s NVIDIA 7300GS based GV-NX73G128D 128MB, S3’s Chrome S27 128MB, and Sapphire’s Radeon X1300Pro 256MB. We’ll be putting through our usual suite of gaming and multimedia benchmarks to see which card offers the most performance for your money.

The Specs

	Sapphire X1300 Pro	Gigabyte 7300GS	S3 Chrome S27
Vertex shaders	2	3	4
Vertex shader version	3.0	3.0	2.0+
Pixel shaders	4	4	8
Pixel shader version	3.0	3.0	2.0+
Texture units	4	4	8
Core Clock	600 MHz	550 MHz	700 MHz
Memory Clock	800 MHz	800 MHz	1.4 GHz
Memory Type	GDDR2	GDDR2	GDDR3
Memory Size	256 MB	128 MB	128 MB
Memory Interface	128-bit	64-bit	128-bits
Multimedia Features	AVIVO	PURE Video	Chromotion Video Engine
Video Hardware Acceleration	H.264, WMV9, MPEG2	H.264, WMV9, MPEG2	WMV9, MPEG2, MPEG4
Fab Process	90nm	90nm	90nm

S3’s Chrome S27 appears to have the most power as far as specifications go—with four vertex shaders and eight pixel pipelines. The X1300Pro only offers two vertex shaders and two pixel pipelines while the 7300GS has three vertex shaders and four pixel pipelines, quite a bit less pixel pushing power than S3’s Chrome S27. ATI and NVIDIA’s GPU do have a slight advantage over the S3 Chrome S27 in terms of features with the X1300Pro and 7300GS offering support for shader model 3.0 and vertex shader 3.0. Since the Chrome S27 is based on VIA’s previous DeltaChrome GPU its shader support is limited to SM2.0+ and VS2.0+.

Sapphire clocks the X1300Pro at 600 MHz core while Gigabyte clocks the 7300GS at 550 MHz. Both cards are coupled with 800 MHz GDDR2 memory. S3 clocks the Chrome S27 pretty high at 700 MHz and matches it with 1.4 GHz GDDR3 memory. In terms of memory size the X1300Pro has 256MB that looks great on the retail box but the X1300Pro doesn’t have enough power to make use of all the memory. The 7300GS and Chrome S27 have 128MB that is more than enough for the GPU’s processing capabilities. While the X1300Pro and Chrome S27 have 128-bit interfaces, the 7300GS is limited to a 64-bit memory interface. This may hinder the 3D and gaming performance of the 7300GS.

Each of the three cards has its own branding for the integrated video processing features. ATI’s AVIVO and NVIDIA’s PURE Video offer acceleration for h.264, Windows Media Video 9, and MPEG2 where as S3’s Chromation Video Engine accelerates WMV9, MPEG2, and MPEG4 but lacks h.264 support. S3’s Chromation Video engine is a little behind AVIVO and PURE Video as far as video features go. The lack of h.264 acceleration will certainly make some home theater PC aficionados pass on the Chrome S27. 

H.264 Video

Gigabyte’s 7300GS comes out on top when it comes to h.264 decoding performance. Performance is still quite good with the X1300Pro as well. S3’s Chrome S27 uses close to 20% higher CPU cycles with its lack of h.264 hardware acceleration capabilities.

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• Gigabyte GV-NX73G128D (7300GS) (1 of 12)
• S3 Chrome S27 (2 of 12)
• Sapphire X1300Pro (3 of 12)
• Test Setup (4 of 12)
• 3DMark06 (5 of 12)
• Game Performance (6 of 12)
• Windows Media Video HD (7 of 12)
• H.264 Video (8 of 12)
• HDTV Transport Stream & DIVX (9 of 12)
• HQV DVD Benchmark (10 of 12)
• Power Consumption (11 of 12)
• Conclusion (12 of 12)