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Price: $99.99USD () / $132CND (

Recent operating system advances have forced a few changes to current hardware and the discrete graphic processing segment has not gone un-touched by this. PowerColor Computer Incorporated has been a major partner producing ATI graphics solutions since 1999 under the PowerColor brand. They have a number of active products on the market right now and have had to do a couple of product line refreshes in order to keep up with the advancements in operating systems.



As I mentioned, the recent release of Microsoft Windows Vista has left some rather recent hardware releases almost obsolete overnight. Not so much in the sense that they can't do the job or don't serve a purpose anymore, but they no longer meet requirements to be certified ready for newest operating system on the market. This has forced some slight adjustments in certain ATI chipsets and one of those left out in the dark is the ATI X1300.



Because of a lack of Vista ready accreditation, the X1300 has been replaced by the chipset on the video card I will be looking at today, the X1550. PowerColor has been extremely quick to update and release the X1550 based cards in order to be Vista ready at time of Windows Vista release. The PowerColor X1550 512MB DDRII video card I have in my position sports the necessary changes to be fully Vista certified minting all the features of the previous X1300 offerings.