Although nVidia is maybe the best known video card manufacturer, there are several companies which have been able to deliver superior performance when nVidia didn't even exist. I guess it isn't so good that here at PC Hardware we have reviewed mostly nVidia based video cards and not even one video card from ATI. Over the years ATI has brought several important innovations to video cards market, but in many cases they failed to offer the nVidia performance level. One of the biggest lacks of ATI video cards were drivers. I think that it's poor marketing to present (even to press) video cards with uncompleted or faulty drivers. Users' decisions are much based on what they read and products with software problems are easily remembered. But I am not here to discuss ATI's marketing strategy; I want to talk about performance and results. Fortunately we will take a look today to an ATI 7500 based video card from Gigabyte, more exactly to a card in Gigabyte Maya family: AR64S-H.

First look

The packaging is simply impressive for a video card targeted to budget market. The box is quite large and inside it you can find eight CDs, one user's manual, one Y type video cable and the video card. The CDs included contain drivers, Power DVD XP 4.0, Heavy Metal FAKK2, Serious Sam, Motocross Mania, 4x4 Evolution, Rune and Oni. The latest six are games, which mean that we have a video card bundled with a lot of fun power. The Y type cable has both S-video and composite outputs which is basically a good thing because there are many users who do not have devices able to work with S-video. There are no video inputs available. The user's manual is written in both English and Chinese (I think) and offers a decent view on the physical and software installation. Overall I was satisfied about the Gigabyte packaging.
Let's take a look to the most important part of the box, the video card. From the first look the heatsink seemed impressive: it was large and covered more than half of the card's surface. It's interesting that only one heatsink deals with both the GPU and memory cooling. To achieve such a performance the Gigabyte heatsink had to be very well designed because the GPU and memory modules are different in height. As I mentioned above the card has S-video out, but it also comes with DVI output for digital flat panels. The integration level of Radeon products is very high; there are no external chips for digital video out or TV video out. In fact the only additional chip on the card is a Winbond monitoring device.

Gigabyte AR64H-S Video Card

Just take a look to the above picture, the card design is pretty simple, nothing spectacular. The Gigabyte design is a little different from the ATI reference design. Most users will easily remark the smaller size of the card.