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Sapphire RADEON X1650 XT

Can Sapphire's new X1650 XT take a bite out of the GeForce 7600 GT's market domination? We show you what you can expect out of your X1650 XT and 7600 GT in real world gameplay. You might be surprised what we see out of ATI's new "sub-$150" video card.

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. With the possibility of further leveraging AMD platform hardware thanks to AMD's acquisition of ATI, Sapphire Technology is in a good position to become a stronger market leader in high performance and mainstream gaming computer hardware.

On October 30th 2006, ATI launched the RADEON X1650 XT GPU. Manufactured on an 80nm process, it features 24 pixel shader processors, 8 vertex shader processors, 10-bit color processing, HDCP support, and Dual-Link DVI support. Perhaps most importantly, it boasts native crossfire support; no dongle, no master card. Just like SLI, all you need is two of the same video cards and a pair of bridge connectors, and you're good to go.

The video card we're evaluating this time is a Sapphire Technology RADEON X1650 XT. It sports the ATI RADEON X1650 XT GPU, clocked at 575 MHz, and 256 MB of GDDR3 clocked at 675 MHz, or 1.35 GHz DDR. As those are ATI's recommended reference clocks, this is not a factory overclocked video card. It also packs a pair of Dual-Link DVI-I connectors, and the requisite HDTV output port.

The Sapphire RADEON X1650 XT

The video card we are evaluating today is a reference Sapphire X1650 XT. It was made by Sapphire, but the cooling apparatus differs from the retail version. The image above is from Sapphire's web site and shows what you will see from the retail product. The PCB appears to be exactly the same between the picture shown and our reference video card; there should be no performance differences. The rest of the images are of the video card we received for evaluation.

The heat sink on the reference design is similar in shape to the cooler on the RADEON X1650 PRO, but it is considerably smaller. It is made of what looks like thin, folded copper fins attached to a thicker copper base plate. The small fan draws air in from around the fan, and pushes it through the heat-sink.

The heat-sink does cover most of the memory on this video card, but two modules are still exposed..The Sapphire RADEON X1650 XT provides two Dual-Link DVI-I connectors, and an HDTV output connector. Though ATI's reference design shows an auxiliary PCI-Express power connector, the video card we received did not have the connector nor did it need it.

From the exposed memory, we can see that this video card uses, Infineon Memory modules. Infineon recently split it's DRAM division off into a separate company, called Qimonda. The memory model used here is HYB18H512321AF-14 (link to PDF), which is the same memory used by ASUS on their EAX1600 XT Silent video card. This particular memory chip is set to go out of production in the second quarter of 2007.

You can see the two CrossFire bridge connectors atop the video card. In the retail package you should receive one bridge connector; this way if you purchase two video cards you will have the two required connectors for CrossFire.

Pricing

ATI recommends an MSRP of $149 USD for RADEON X1650 XT based video cards. During the start of this evaluation the Sapphire RADEON X1650 XT was available for $119.99 at Newegg; however during the course of the evaluation it disappeared from Newegg and can no longer be found there. In fact it was very hard to find any in stock anywhere. As of this very moment of writing it can be found at ZipZoomFly for $164.99, we can’t guarantee that by the time you read this though it will still be in stock. We’ll talk more about availability in the conclusion.

For comparison, we are running this video card against an NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT. The 7600 GT can be had for $129.99 USD, or $109.99 USD after Mail-In Rebate.