HIS Excalibur ATI RADEON 7500LE
Remember that the “HIS Excalibur” will not look the same as the normal 7500 Radeon offered by ATI and there’ll be slight modifications. Of course any add-ons are most welcome, and who’ll ever complain
Looking at the box will not ring any bells or whistles in anybody’s mind, since the box alone is not much bigger than the card itself. Nevertheless the cover design is so cool, I wish I could get that printed on to my case :. Opening up the box you can’t help but notice that “HIS” has kept everything very simple and they don’t offer much more than the most required stuff. All that the box contains is the card, driver CD and a cable for S-video TV-out. To some this may not be what they’re looking for, however I think this setup is very practical considering the market “HIS” is targeting their products at. Actually when you think about it, all this card is lacking is a few extra game CD’s and a fancy large box, and nothing more than that. “HIS” has also changed the color of the PCB from it’s original green color to a dark brown and it looks great.
Note that the original Radeon 7500 has a core/memory setting of 270/230 MHz, however the Excalibur 7500LE has been set with a core/memory speed of 270/200 MHz. Past revisions of this card had a memory setting of only 166MHz, thankfully “HIS” decided to include DDR chips to their radeon cards to make them faster and more practical for present times.
The Excalibur 7500LE is equipped with 64MB of DDR SDRAM and there are four 16MB modules on the card, two on either side. One thing I noticed with “HIS” products is that they simply do not compromise in quality even though they offer their products very cheap. Taking a closer look at the memory you can’t help but notice the Samsung 5ns DDR memory they have installed into this card. Samsung memory are of very high standard, and they offer quite a degree of overclockability than most other memory types. As such we might be able to see some overclocking action here, so we shall soon put this theory to test.
The card is fitted with a standard stock heatsink and fan combo which is not very impressive in overclocking terms. One thing i noticed with the heatsink is that there’s hardly any thermal paste applied between the chip and the cooler. Removing the heatsink it kind of makes you laugh seeing the amount of thermal paste “HIS” has applied on the core. I didn’t waste any time applying some arctic silver on the GPU and spread it right across the whole surface. If you don’t have arctic silver use any thermal paste you have lying around to ensure that the whole surface of the chip is in contact with the heatsink.
However the card does a pretty good job at it’s standard setting and we didn’t experience any problems. If you plan on some heavy overclocking with this board, I would suggest you get a high-end chipset cooler and install it, as I’m sure the standard cooler will not go too far before it crashes.
Looking at the front I/O ports, you’ll notice that it includes 3 connectors, one standard 15-pin VGA connector, an S-Video connector for TV-output and a DVI connector. Unfortunately we didn’t have a LCD monitor to test out the DVI connector, but I’m sure it’s good. We were able to test the TV-out however so we got hold of one 29″ TV and loaded up Collin McRays Rally. (guess I don’t need to mention I’m a car fanatic : ). I have tried out TV-out’s from GeForce MX cards and believe me, there’s quite a contrast between those and the quality given out by the Radeon 7500LE. It’s really very impressive and has lived up to its mark. It’s certainly a job well done by “HIS”.
As we mentioned before this unit comes with the bear essentials to keep the price down. So don’t expect to see any game bundles along with the unit.
Alright time to see how this card performs. Since the Radeon 7500 is similar to the GeForce 4 MX440 and other budget GeForce MX cards, we decided to get hold of a similar lineup for comparison.
