Enhanced Performance

As you might have noticed from the package content, there was an extra CD included by PowerColor with the simple indication on it. It was a CD labeled by TuL with the description OC BIOS for the Radeon X1600 PRO. So what does that mean exactly? After checking the BIOS, we can say that the only change done by PowerColor is a 100MHz increase on the core which ends up in 600MHz. So we actually flashed the PowerColor Radeon X1600 PRO to this OC BIOS. When trying to overclock even more, the card couldn't really take much more and at 605MHz started to show random lock-ups. The memory, which remained at 810MHz could be clocked up to 900MHz. So let's see how the card performs at these enhanced speeds of 600/900MHz on our game selection.

Doom 3 - Enhanced Gaming Results

	1024x768	1280x1024
4x AA	37.1 fps	26.8 fps

Quake 4 - Enhanced Gaming Results

	1024x768	1280x1024
4x AA	45.3 fps	33.4 fps

Far Cry - Enhanced Gaming Results

	1024x768	1280x1024
4x AA	52.83 fps	37.06 fps

X³: Reunion - Enhanced Gaming Results

	1024x768	1280x1024
4x AA	38.043 fps	28.131 fps

Quite some nice increases have been recorded during our gaming performance. As you can see some extra potential is present and with the core running at 600MHz the PRO edition is clocked just a bit higher than the standard XT version. This was all attained with the standard cooling solution, but we can suspect somehow that with some better heatsink it would lead to better results in the end. With some extra cooling some extra tweaking should be feasible. But it is definitely a good choice from PowerColor to include the OC BIOS version for their Radeon X1600 PRO video card.

Final Thoughts

There is still a market for AGP, that's for sure. Many still own an AGP based system and would like to enjoy some of the newer games as well and wouldn't want to upgrade immediately at that would mean quite a bit more then just change one piece of hardware. When you are just looking for a good video card that does support the latest technology and doesn't come at a huge budget than the Radeon X1600 PRO is the way to go. It has an attractive price tag and delivers decent performance.

However it isn't all that good. It can stand it's own against the GeForce 6600 GT, but when looking upon the real competitor of it's segment it isn't a match for the GeForce 6800 GS or GeForce 7600 GT. Although these cards fall into about the same price range as the Radeon X1600 PRO. In a way to somehow compensate, PowerColor includes in their bundle a new BIOS which overclocks the core to 600MHz and by doing so giving it an extra performance boost.

Based on what we found during our testing, we are very reluctant to recommend the Radeon X1600 PRO to anybody who owns already a mainstream graphics card, like a GeForce 6800. If you are thinking about upgrading from a lower generation then we can warmly point you towards the PowerColor Radeon X1600 PRO video card, especially due to the excellent figures put down by the HDR enabled benchmark rounds. On top of that the image quality delivered by ATI based products is quite often a bit better then the competition and we could experience this as well.

We would like to see something even faster from ATI but we learned that at this time there aren't any plans for an AGP of the high-end chips. Considering the performance delivered, small design and rich features it provides an alternative towards NVIDIA which had already done a first step towards the AGP owners with their GeForce 7800 GS. If you are looking for a mid-range video card, and image quality does mean a lot then this would be your choice to go for!

Pros

• Attractive Package
• Easy Setup and Installation
• Excellent Value
• Avivo Technology
• Shader Model 3.0 Support
• Updated BIOS Included
• Some Overclocking Potential

Cons

• Average Performance
• Gameless Bundle

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