About a month ago, ATI launched its new flagship model, the Radeon X1950 XTX. Along with it, other cores were launched too. Among them was the Radeon X1650 PRO. While it is nice to feast our eyes by admiring the performance of the Radeon X1950 series, most of us are looking for most bang per buck. Will the Radeon X1650 series be just that? Just what is this card? As the name suggests, it is a little step up from the Radeon X1600 XT. With the same amount of pipelines, and slightly higher clocks, is there anything to look forward to with the Radeon X1650 PRO? No doubt, this card at least runs cooler, insured by a smaller manufacturing process. - techPowerUp!

Powercolor Radeon X1650 PRO 256MB PCI-E Review

The red card comes with a medium sized black heatsink, which should do a good job of keeping the card cool. Unfortunately, even though the heatsink stretches over the memory in size, it does not cool it, as there is no thermal interface material between the chips and the heatsink. At stock, the core runs at 600MHz, the memory at 1400MHz effectively. As you may have noticed, the card's pipeline count is identical to that of the Radeon X1600 XT. The memory communicates with the core over a 128-bit wide interface. In terms of size, the card is about comparable to the Radeon X800 GT.

The Radeon X1650 PRO is a card of the moment. It works today, and if you don't insist on playing games at their maximum detail, it will work for you in the future too. It is really just a spiced up Radeon X1600 XT, and therefore we can't expect any major performance gains. Unfortunately, with the release of the Radeon X1300 XT, which has the same core as the Radeon X1600 series, I don't see much point in dishing out an extra $20 to buy the Radeon X1650 PRO. Effectively, the Radeon X1300 XT has dug a grave for the Radeon X1650 PRO. I was a little disappointed that I could not overclock the card during testing.

But this obviously wasn't Powercolor's mistake, the software, or better the lack of it was to be blamed. Perhaps through overclocking Radeon X1650 PRO we might see bigger differences. The only time that I would consider buying the Radeon X1650 PRO would be if it was within $10 of the price of the Radeon X1300 XT.