Date:
Monday , October 30, 2006
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
Google +1

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?

continued...

For our system platform setup we are using the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe with an AMD Athlon-64 3500+ and 1GB of Corsair XMS DDR400 RAM. We are evaluating the Sapphire RADEON X1650 PRO video card against two cards: the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS and the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT, explanations below.

Article Image

Video Card Test Setup

Article Image

All three video cards were tested at their default frequencies, as you can see above. We also used the latest drivers available at the time of evaluation.

GPU Class and Price Class Comparisons

Whenever possible, we like to compare video cards within each other’s price range. We either compare by street price or MSRP as the need demands. Sapphire's RADEON X1650 PRO, however, presents us with some obstacles.

First, the current street price ($129.99), is about 30% HIGHER than MSRP.

For those reasons, we are comparing Sapphire's RADEON X1650 PRO against two video cards. The first video card, an NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS, is in the same intended performance class, but is considerably cheaper than the current street price. The second video card, an NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT, is in a higher performance class than the Sapphire RADEON X1650 PRO, but is closer to parity with it's street price. A GeForce 7600 GS can currently be found for about $103, and a 7600 GT can be had for about $130.

Game and Video Card Evaluation Setup

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. We use a high performance system, with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.

In our graphs we use some abbreviations to indicate the method of AA or AF being used.

In our graphs, we use some abbreviations to indicate the method of AA or AF being used.

AD AA = Adaptive AA – Indicates the use of ATI’s Adaptive AA on X1000 series video cards.

HQ AF = High Quality Anisotropic Filtering – Indicates the use of ATI’s High Quality option for Anisotropic Filtering that is not angle dependent.

TR MSAA = Transparency Multisampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.

TR SSAA = Transparency Supersampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.