Sapphire Radeon X300SE HyperMemory & Leadtek WinFast PX6200 TC TDH
 

To make a respectable profit in the video card industry, a company cannot rely on its flagship cards to bring in high margins. Instead, a graphics card company must produce mid-level and low-end cards that will sell in big lots to OEMs. That's where the big money is. Several months ago, ATI and NVIDIA decided to spice up the low-end segment with their HyperMemory and TurboCache technologies, respectively.

To put it simply, these two technologies use system memory for graphics processing. Rather than just using the RAM embedded on a HyperMemory or TurboCache card, these cards also use up to a pre-determined amount of your system's RAM. Both technologies store and access graphics data in the system memory to provide a less expensive way to get more overall video RAM. Companies would have liked to do this earlier, but the AGP interface wasn't quite up to the task. The PCI Express interface, on the other hand, is fast enough to make it a reality.

With both HyperMemory and TurboCache, the card comes with a certain (typically small) amount of on-board memory, say 32MB. The card can then scale up to a defined level of total memory by using system RAM. ATI's HyperMemory cards come in two variations: the 128MB HyperMemory version features 32MB VRAM on board, and the 256MB HyperMemory version has 128MB VRAM on board. NVIDIA has so far chosen three different configurations of TurboCache cards: the 128MB TurboCache version has either 16MB or 32MB of local memory, and the 256MB version sports 64MB.

The two cards I'll be comparing in this review are the Sapphire Radeon X300SE 128MB HyperMemory and the Leadtek WinFast PX6200 TC TDH, a TurboCache card supporting 256MB of total memory.

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