First Impressions

A reasonably presented box, definitely not a cheap design, but lets not judge by the cover shall we! It does say something about 1GB on the box, that caught our eyes too, then the subtitle says Hypermemory. That changes things, but little bit. Its time to see inside.

XFX has its reputation for making quality products at mid to high end range, but the card itself did not show signs of any compromise. The board is tastefully dark, with black heatsink. The faceplate is has a nice tint to it and the cool looking red DVI connector. The box included one low profile bracket that was also tinted in same hue though it only accounted for the DVI and HDMI, the VGA is sacrificed at low profile usage. There is one thing rather unusual though. This card has a heatsink at the other side too. Not something we'd expect on a budget card.

We tested the card with FurMark extreme burn, and behold. The card heats up gradually and flats out at 64. The rise was from 52 degrees giving it a rise of 12 degrees only. Sure our test system was an overkill with ventilation and fans, in a real world systems would be expected to be humble, but as a comparison, in the very system an ATI 4870 has reached over 90 degrees with this test. The stable temperature will translate into system stability in the long run, give it closed cramped cases and a years worth of dust, we still got a crocodile waiting to surprise.

Now to come back to the 1GB hyper-memory. There is 512MB memory on board but should something demand more, no problems. It appears that the card is able to share much more than an extra 512MB. At our test system it showed total available memory of 1791MB. But its dreaming! The card does not have what it takes to process 1.7GB of data 30 times a second. Just in case if someone finds a way to utilize all that memory, its there! We did try playing a game with it, and Need for Speed Shift was handy for that. It ran the game with a lot of compromise in details and lowered settings. The fact is that though you can play games with it, you will not want to with that many compromises. Then again if you want to play online games like Evony or other games that does not ask for too much, this might just pull it off. This is not a really gaming card, but having said that, this is a great card for your HTPC. It makes no sound, has on board HDMI for your large screen TV or amp with support for 7.1 Digital Audio. Dual desktop at full 1080p HD resolutions will provide plenty of desktop real estate.

Overall, it boils down to one question. Should you go for it or are there other choices?
Choices there are plenty, but there has to be something darn good to pass this one by. The only imperfection this package has is its missing a low profile bracket for the VGA port. The quality and workmanship of XFX lives on with this card too and at a price of near AUD50 it is a very serious contender.