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PowerColor Radeon X1600 PRO 512MB AGP Review |
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Written by Zombie
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Tuesday, 09 May 2006 |
Coming from The Inquirer
is a review on the PowerColor Radeon X1600 PRO 512MB AGP graphics card. We don't
play that much with AGP cards anymore. A lot of our readers claim that they are
old and obsolete but we don't agree with them. A lot of you out there still have
an AGP system and want to upgrade. Cards such as the PowerColor Radeon X1600 PRO
AGP with 512MB of memory sound like the right choice at least from the
specifications but we trust in benchmarketing more than the tick box numbers.
This card won't cost you much money either. In the end it all comes down to what
you get in terms or performance against the money you
invested.
 PowerColor Radeon X1600 PRO 512MB AGP Review
The card works at 500MHz core and uses the RV530 graphics core. It has four
physical pipelines but it can do twelve shader operations per clock, this is
enough to beat a GeForce 6600 GT but not the new and much more expensive GeForce
7800 GS. The card uses the rather modest 800MHz DDR2 memory and has a good old
floppy power connector on. The massive 512MB of memory is 128-bit but it does
the job. It supports AGP8x port and since the RV530 chip is native PCI Express
solution in uses the Rialto bridge to make it possible. The Rialto bridge
converts the PCI Express signals towards the AGP interface.
We decided to
overclock the card and we were very surprised with the results. We overclocked
it from the default 500MHz core and 800MHz memory to a massive 600MHz core and
945MHz memory. There is a special overclocking BIOS but you can overclock the
card with an ATI or similar
overclocking tool, a BIOS change is not required. It is a lot of card for $134
or just about ₤100 in the UK. These are the cheapest price we could find in
etail stores. For really decent money you will be able to get decent frame
rates.
Well it is not state of the art performance buy you can not expect
more either. When overclocked card runs even better and gets ten to fifteen
percent faster than the default clocked one. I can recommend this card to anyone
that wants to spend less than €150 for the graphics card as it should run faster
than NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 GT
AGP and will cost about the same. We would like to see something even faster
from ATI but we learned that at
this time there are no plans for AGP version of R520 cards so maybe we need to
wait for the RV560/RV570 chips to see the new AGP card.
Till that time
this card will have to do but you always have NVIDIA solution as an alternative. All depends on your own
favorite brand and needs, and of course how money you really want to spend on a
new video card. The Radeon X1600 PRO is a good choice, but you never know if NVIDIA will bring the GeForce
7600 GT to the AGP playground, next to the GeForce 7800 GS.
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