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Sapphire Radeon X1650 PRO

Sapphire Technology's RADEON X1650 PRO has come out swinging at an excellent price point. Can the X1650 PRO and Sapphire's reputation for quality deliver a knockout blow to NVIDIA's 7600 GS series?

Sapphire Technology is a company known by most computer gaming hardware enthusiasts. The Hong Kong based manufacturer outputs 1.8 million graphics cards per month and currently employs more than 3,000 people worldwide. They offer a range of video cards that exclusively feature ATI RADEON Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Aside from video cards, they also manufacturer motherboards for both Intel and AMD platforms. According to ATI Technologies CEO Dave Orton:

Sapphire is ATI's largest and best performing partner World Wide.

With the possibility of further leveraging AMD platform hardware thanks to the AMD-ATI merger, Sapphire Technology is positioned to be a real market leader in high performance gaming computer hardware.

Up for evaluation is Sapphire's Radeon X1650 PRO Graphics Card. It features an ATI RADEON X1650 GPU clocked at 600 MHz, and 256 MB of DDR3 running at 700 MHz (1.4 GHz DDR) on a 128-bit bus. Since it follows ATI's reference clock speeds, this is not a factory overclocked video card.

The ATI RADEON X1650 PRO GPU features twelve pixel shader processors, five vertex shader processors, and four raster operators (ROPs). It packs 157 million transistors, and is manufactured on a 90nm process. It is interesting to note that the RADEON X1650 Pro series is exactly the same as the architecture as the RADEON X1600 series, but is clocked faster and (ostensibly) priced lower. For example, on the RADEON X1600 XT, which is the highest end X1600 series video card, the GPU and memory are both clocked exactly 10 MHz slower than ATI's reference design for the RADEON X1650 PRO. Sapphire's web site reports that the GPU on this video card is clocked at 450 MHz, and the memory at 650 MHz (1.3 GHz DDR). That is incorrect. ATI's reference design clearly calls for a 600 MHz GPU clock and a 700 MHz (1.4 GHz DDR) memory clock and we checked, our video card is clocked at the ATI reference clock speeds.

The X1650 GPU supports shader model 3.0 and up to 6x adaptive AA. Similar to NVIDIA's transparency anti-aliasing, ATI's adaptive anti-aliasing allows alpha textures, such as foliage and fences, to receive the benefits of antialiasing. It also supports FP16-HDR+AA support and high quality anisotropic filtering (HQAF), both of which are currently are exclusive to ATI GPUs.

The Sapphire RADEON X1650 PRO

The external box has a very slick design and conveys all of the necessary information you would need to make a purchasing decision. The front of the box features one of Sapphire's cyborg mascot women and proclaims "ATI No. 1 manufacturer". The back and sides of the box are bereft of the usual smattering of game screenshots and instead give a detailed breakdown of the video card's features and system requirements.

Our model is an early sample and thus lacks the Sapphire sticker with logo that will be placed on the heatsink of all Sapphire video cards. The video card itself has a quite large heat-sink consisting of many thin, folded copper fins attached to a fairly thick copper baseplate. The fan is positioned such that it sucks cool air from the front of the case, dragging it across the heat-sink, and blowing it down toward the bottom of the case. If your case is inverted, it will blow the hot air up. In any case, proper exhaust is important.

The heat-sink covers the memory, but does not actually touch it. For connectors, this video card provides two dual-link DVI-I ports and the familiar HDTV out.

Potential buyers may want to note that Catalyst 6.9 does not support the X1650 series of GPUs, and you will have to install the Catalyst 6.10 BETA to make it work until a new driver is released with support. All of the requisite cables and adaptors are accounted for, including a single DVI-I to VGA adaptor, an HDTV-out dongle, and a composite TV-out adaptor and cable. The only software included was CyberLink PowerDVD 6. The included "Getting Started" manual is well-written and detailed. It is written in six languages, and the English portion is nine pages long.

Pricing

Sapphire suggests a retail price of $99.95, but searching around we found it priced higher than MSRP, Newegg, has it for $129.99. As we've said before, [H]Enthusiast evaluates video cards based on a price-comparison. For this reason, we are evaluating the Sapphire RADEON X1650 PRO against two competing NVIDIA video cards: the GeForce 7600 GS, and the GeForce 7600 GT.

The GeForce 7600 GS is in the performance class of the X1650 PRO GPU, and is in the price class of Sapphire's MSRP. The GeForce 7600 GT is actually slightly above the performance class of the X1650 PRO GPU, but is in the price class of the Sapphire RADEON X1650 PRO as it currently exists for sale. In the future, we hope that actual retail pricing will be closer to or lower than Sapphire's suggested retail price.