Up Close & Personal

Moving away from the RV530 core and Rialto bridge which form the processing power of the Radeon X1600 PRO, all that needs to be backed by some excellent memory chips. As Infineon has recently made some big progress on high performance graphics memory chips, it comes as no surprise that ATI opted for these cheaper speed monsters. The PowerColor Radeon X1600 PRO comes with eight memory chips in total which are divided amongst the front and back side of the board.

When looking at the front side, each of the four memory chips is partly covered by the copper heatsink. This might not really do much to the cooling of these chips, but it is still better than nothing. Each side has four memory chips which are positioned around the RV530 GPU. On the front side these are put next to each other two by two with some minor space in between.

In total the Radeon X1600 PRO features 512B GDDR2 memory which is running at 810MHz, following the reference settings by ATI. In essence that would mean that some decent 2.5ns memory chips would be just fine for the job. And that is just what has been used by PowerColor for their Radeon X1600 PRO. They have opted for the Infineon DDR2 memory, rated at 2.5ns or 800MHz operating speed. As these chips are already set at their advertised speed, some minor overclocking might be possible but we don't expect that much out of it.

Looking at the placement of the memory chips, we can state that on both front and back of the PCB, these are set around the core and positioned almost at the same opposite location. The ram chips at the back side however don't come with any cooling which isn't actually any issue as these don't produce that much heat and are powered by only 1.8V of normal operation.

We would like to point you as well on the power connector, since this is an AGP card some extra power needs to be provided by the power supply. We are used to see the big power connection that can be found back on a hard disk, but on the Radeon X1600 PRO we find back a power connection like on a floppy drive. Next to that there is also one jumper present on the card, which is used to select PAL or NTSC. This is actually the TV signal that should be selected. In Europe this is PAL, for US however this should be set to NTSC.

Last but not least is the card's connections. PowerColor for some reason chose to go with one analog and one DVI connection so anyone with dual DVI monitors is unfortunately out of luck with this product. The analog connection needs to go to make this product feasible for everyone. Most people are buying DVI capable LCD monitors and some might even buy two for a dual monitor desktop working environment. The video card industry needs to let this setup go and stick to two DVI with two converters thrown into the hardware bundle. This will cover everyone's needs.