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Sapphire Radeon X1600 PRO Ultimate Edition Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Friday, 09 June 2006 |
Virtual-Hideout reveals a review on the Sapphire Radeon X1600 PRO Ultimate Edition graphics card. Sapphire has released a new graphics card based upon the Radeon X1600 core with a passive cooling solution and going by the Ultimate Edition abbreviation. The Radeon X1600 series of cards have been labeled as mid-ranged type cards with the price being well under $200, keeping this graphics card from being a budget buster. The Radeon X1600 cards are also CrossFire ready, but what makes this card Ultimate compared to the others in its class? The GPU core is set at 500MHz and the memory at 800MHz. Seems to be just like all the other Radeon X1600's out there.
 Sapphire Radeon X1600 PRO Ultimate Edition Review
So far, the only difference I have noticed on this card compared to some others I have seen is the big heatpipe cooler attached to it. I mean, this card weighs a ton, and the heatsink is massive on both sides of the card. The way it's designed on the front side of the video card, the heatsink covers the GPU and RAM is a solid chunk aluminum. Under the heatsink lies the GPU, the ATI RV530 PRO. This GPU is found on the Radeon X1600 series of cards, and features 12 pixel pipelines, a 500MHz core clock, and has a power consumption of 40W. The Radeon X1600 cards are also CrossFire ready.
The memory chips used are Hynix branded and rated at 2.5ns. These DDR2 memory modules are rated at 800MHz. Being that they are already clocked at this frequency, it will be interesting to see how much overclocking headroom they can take. The card features 256MB of this memory onboard. The Sapphire Radeon X1600 PRO performed flawlessly and ran like a champ. The specifications fall right in line with other Radeon X1600's out on the market. The difference between this card and most others is the heatpipe cooler. Although, the heatpipes didn't perform as well as I would have liked.
The temps on the Sapphire were higher than on the MSI Radeon X1600 PRO under idle and load conditions. I feel somehow that these heatpipes are not large enough to transfer the heat efficiently from the GPU to the back heatsink where the fan is located. Either larger heatpipes or double the heatpipes are needed to insure proper cooling. Other than the higher temps, I was pleased with Sapphire Radeon X1600 PRO Ultimate Edition. So if you are in the market for a good graphics card and don't want to break the bank, give the Sapphire Radeon X1600 PRO Ultimate Edition a try. It's a good quality card.
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