ATI Radeon X1650 PRO 3-way shootout

[Steve]

With Radeon X1650 PRO rolling with higher clocks and a new lower-than-X1600 XT price, it's certainly worth a peek versus NVIDIA competition. GeCube, HIS and Sapphire fired boards our way, and it's those we present in this piece. With three different coolers and clock levels on test, there's plenty to chat about and present, so onwards we go.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6848

[BrynS]

Thanks for the review, Rys.

One thing though, in your introduction you say:

[...]Being RV530-based, that means a full 5/12/12 configuration (VS/PS/ROP), and since it's RV530 that means 36 discrete pixel shader processors (3 per PS unit) and 12 data samplers too, to round things off from a programmable unit perspective...

Shouldn't that be 12 (discrete?) pixel shader processors given the 4-1-3-2 configuration?

Slightly OT, but a couple of AIBs, like HIS and Sapphire too I think, are refreshing their X1600 AGP SKUs with X1650 products with minimal change, but are notably keeping the slow 128-bit 400MHz DDR2 memory, lumbering them with even slower performance. Any particular reason why there hasn't been an AGP X1600/X1650 with DDR3 RAM as per the PCI-E equivalents? Presumably it's not a Rialto bridge chip limitation, as the X800XL Rialto variants had decent spec ram (256-bit 500MHz DDR3 IIRC)? I suppose with RV560 and RV570 on the horizon, AGP-ers can hope that one of the AIBs produces a decent Rialto version.

I am a bit surprised that none of the ATI AIBs have put together an AGP R520 or R580 yet -- the apparent demand (and hefty price premium) over the past year for AGP 7800/7900GS SKUs should have evidenced a niche market willing to fork out for one, even though the cost of transitioning to a PCI-E system continues to decrease.

Cheers,

BrynS

[madmobile]

It's not a new product. It's just a x1600xt upgrade.

[kempez]

Agreed^

The X1600 pro is a pretty nice card for the price though

[chuckskull]

Nice performance for under a hundred quid. Suprised the 7600GT was as far ahead as it was though.

[kalniel]

Nice performance for under a hundred quid. Suprised the 7600GT was as far ahead as it was though.

I'm not 12 textures per clock vs 4, and 8 ROP vs 4

[chuckskull]

yeah, I was just expecting this to be a bit more of a performer.

[madmobile]

Anyone want to play games at decent speed, shouldn't buy this card.
add extra money for a 7600gt or even a 7900gs is not expensive nowaday.
If you want HDR+AA, wait for a x1950 pro or get a current mid-range x1900gt.

[chuckskull]

Anyone who wants decent speed and HDR+AA wont be a buying s sub £100 graphics card

[madmobile]

yep, if you got a good crossfire motherboard, get 2 x1950pro or one x1950xtx. x1650pro is not really a good card for gaming, even run a pair to crossfire.