Pint-sized card with a heart of silicon.
Before we get too deep into the specs of this card, have a look at it first. Doesn't exactly scream performance, now does it? With a very cut down RV710 core with only 80 shader units (one tenth that of their most powerful) running at 600MHz, with 512MB of GDDR3 on an extremely limiting 64-bit memory bus at 800MHz, this card is a slight mishmash of both good and bad design choices.
Being a half-height card means that all you SFF lovers out there can easily fit this card in there, or those media nuts who have smaller cases can fit one of these in without too much trouble. The cooler is a very small lump of blue anodized aluminium, with a quiet fan in the middle making it only 43.5dBA all the time. When under load however, the whole card will heat up significantly, so make sure you've got some good airflow (temp measuring would not work with the supplied CCC 8.10 used in testing). This is mostly due to the small fan again, that moves an amount of air comparable to a butterfly's fart.
DVI, VGA and analogue video out are present, though frustratingly there is no HDMI - this would have been a perfect choice for this kind of card, and a very silly decision to not include it. There is a DVI > HDMI adapter included in the bundle, but this means that you can only have the one digital display at the time, and can prove quite limiting in a few situations.
Performance, as expected, wasn't great. Both the games were unplayable, and the benchmarks were more like a slideshow than smooth video. The good news is that HD video and older games will run just fine on this card, and really, what else would you buy it for?
Issue: 133 | February, 2012