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Sapphire Radeon X1600 XT 256MB Ultimate Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Friday, 30 June 2006 |
ExtremeTech comes with a review on the Sapphire Radeon X1600 XT 256MB Ultimate video card. It's easy to get excited about the latest graphics cards that cost over $500 and have the ability to effortlessly push high frame rates even at high resolutions with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering enabled. Not everyone can afford to run out and buy one of those impressive GeForce 7950 GX2 or Radeon X1900 XTX cards, though. For the majority of users, more than $200 is too much to spend for a graphics card. And for others, performance and price isn't the primary concern. It's growing ever more common for enthusiasts to build nearly silent PC's, or quiet home theater PC's meant to sit in the living room.
 Sapphire Radeon X1600 XT 256MB Ultimate Review
Fortunately, despite the ever rising power chip size and power consumption of modern high-end graphics cards, you can still get good performance and quiet cooling out of the sub-$200 models. We were impressed by the price, performance, and silent operation of the silent GeForce 7600 GT, so it's the perfect candidate to go head-to-head with Sapphire's new silent Radeon X1600 XT Ultimate. This new mid-range card from Sapphire has the same specifications and performance as all the other Radeon X1600 XT cards, only it's got a large, nearly passive cooler that makes it totally silent.
From a technical standpoint, Sapphire's Radeon X1600 XT Ultimate is just like any other. It still has 12 pixel shader processors, 5 vertex shader processors, 4 texture address units and raster operators. It runs at the same clock speeds as the reference Radeon X1600 XT cards do, 590MHz for the core, and 690MHz (1380MHz effective) for the memory, on a 256-bit memory bus. It operates without a power connector. The difference is in the cooling solution. Sapphire's new card has a large heatsink on the front side, connected by heatpipes to a large rear heatsink.
We call this card nearly passively cooled because it does in fact have a fan on the back heatsink. Sapphire informs us that this fan is, for lack of a better descriptor, for emergencies only. It spins, but it spins so slowly and quietly that you can't hear it. It's just there in case you get a bunch of dust clogging up your case fans or something and it gets real hot inside, or some other out-of-the-ordinary event causes it to run a lot hotter than usual. In our experience, it works just as advertised. The fan is quiet enough that we can't reasonably measure it. It is quieter than any CPU cooler, or any other fan.
Sapphire's new silent card isn't exactly surprising, but that doesn't mean it's not a good product. If someone said they had a silently cooled Radeon X1600 XT card, I would expect it to perform exactly as every other Radeon X1600 XT card does, only silently. That's exactly what Sapphire delivered. It's a bit faster than the silent GeForce 7600 GS in a few places, but it's a bit more expensive as well. If you're looking to build a home theater PC, the Sapphire Radeon X1600 XT Ultimate is a pretty good choice. Its 3D performance isn't earth shattering, but it'll play most modern games quite well.
Naming this Radeon X1600 XT card Ultimate is a bit over the top for Sapphire. It doesn't deliver any special surprises; it's not super duper water cooled mega fast or anything. It's just a Radeon X1600 XT running at normal clock speeds with a totally silent cooling solution, and that's fine. It's a perfectly good product, well suited for its intended audience. If you're a hardcore gamer, though, we would suggest spending a little more for something with a bit more kick.
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