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Diamond Viper X1600 PRO 512MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 05 September 2006 |
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Diamond Multimedia is back with a strong lineup of ATI Radeon GPU based video cards. Throughout the 1990s, Diamond Multimedia was a popular player in desktop video cards. They sold video cards based on a number of GPU's. In 2003, broadband company Best Data purchased the brand and assets, creating the current iteration of Diamond Multimedia as an independent division of Best Data. Their products include video cards, sound cards, TV tuners, and various connectivity devices. Diamond's video cards now use ATI GPU's exclusively. The well known Viper brand name is back and is now made up of various Radeon X1900, X1600, X1300, X800, and X700 GPU's. - HardOCP  Diamond Viper X1600 PRO 512MB PCI-E Review
The Diamond Viper X1600 PRO features an ATI Radeon X1600 PRO GPU clocked at 500MHz, runs on a PCI Express x16 bus, and packs 512MB of DDR2 running at 390MHz (780MHz DDR) on a 128-bit bus. The ATI Radeon X1600 PRO GPU features twelve pixel shader processors, five vertex processors, four texture units, four raster operators, eight Z-compare units, and supports 128 threads with ultra-threading technology. The Viper X1600 PRO video card does support ATI's Avivo technology, which provides improved performance and image quality for video playback and capture.
Overclocking is the art of forcing your hardware to run at higher frequencies than factory preset clock speeds. With various overclocking utilities, you can not only change clock speeds, but you can even adjust voltages and fan speed levels, effectively customizing your holistic gaming experience. The Diamond Viper X1600 PRO proved to be a difficult video card to overclock. The Catalyst 6.8 drivers did not provide the Overdrive option for this video card, so we were forced to look elsewhere. The fastest stable overclock we were able to achieve was 574MHz in the GPU core, and 454MHz (908MHz effective) on the memory.
To make it clear to all, the ATI Radeon X1600 PRO GPU does not benefit from having 512MB of memory to work with. The primary benefit of having 512MB of memory on a video card is to provide very fast, local storage for many high resolution textures and high antialiasing settings. The ATI Radeon X1600 PRO utilizes a 128-bit DDR2 memory bus, which definitely does not have the performance behind it to allow very high resolutions and antialiasing settings. The 512MB of DDR2 on this video card in no way improves the performance of a Radeon X1600 PRO in current games.
When video cards are as closely matched in performance and quality as the Diamond Viper X1600 PRO 512MB and the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS 256MB, other aspects become more important than they would otherwise be. The Diamond Viper X1600 PRO is a solid gaming video card and a good value. It can be found for a reasonable price, and it delivers performance appropriate for its cost. In this graphics card market segment, $20-30 can be a large price difference. Since we can typically find GeForce 7600 GS models for cheaper online we lean toward that as being the best value.
If you play games like Oblivion or Battlefield 2 the price difference can be justified in favor of the Diamond Viper X1600 PRO for a better gaming experience. Diamond is back folks and once again is here to make their mark on the video card world with the Viper series. The Diamond Viper X1600 PRO is a worthy video card if you are in the market for an affordable mainstream gaming experience.
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