The Cards - Sapphire X1300XT

Number 3 on the board is the Sapphire X1300XT and its very funky white box. The front of the box is a pretty standard setup for Sapphire. While being white and having a funky alien on the front, we also have some of the main features. 256MB of memory, DVI, HD Video, PCI Express along with a note about The Da Vinci Code being inside along with a mention that this is an overclocked edition. We also have a little Windows Vista Ready certification logo in the bottom right corner of the box.

The back of the box follows our standard setup with a blurb on the card and bit about what is included inside the box in a number of languages. We also can see some of the key features across the bottom of the box and awards that have been given to Sapphire over the past few years.

With the outside done we dive into the inside and have with us a copy of The Da Vinci Code game along with a copy of PowerDVD, component out cables, DVI to VGA connector and S-Video to RCA connector.

The Sapphire X1300XT like our other cards here today also has quite a large cooler but quite a small fan. It's pretty standard though with the air running across the fins and cooling both the core and the memory located on the front of the card.

A quick look at the back again sees nothing that stands out though we can see that the heatsink fan is screwed in but more importantly that the card is a DDR-3 model which isn't mentioned on the front of the box. The front of the box only mentioned that 256MB of GDDR memory was included.

Moving to the side of the card it is the only one here that doesn't offer Dual DVI. Instead we have a single DVI port, VGA port and our S-Video out connection that can be used with the cables included in the box.

Clock Speeds

The Sapphire X1300XT is another DDR-3 memory card that comes with an increased core speed of 600MHz and a memory clock speed of 1400MHz DDR. Sapphire like most other companies also offer a DDR-2 model with lower clock speeds at a cheaper price.