It would be fair to say that generally public and media attention is squarely focused on the high end releases from Ati and Nvidia. While these cards are the sexiest pieces of hardware available on the market the truth is it is the mid to budget range were most of the consumer money is spent. These competitively priced graphics cards have to be able to run the majority of titles without sacrificing much eye-candy to achieve an acceptable frame rate. ATI’s parade horse in this sector has (until recently) been the X1600 XT, which differs only slightly from the newest bully on the market – The X1650 PRO. Currently the pricing of these cards is hard to nail down, however we have seen them in the UK for around £90 so it could well be quite the bargain. Let’s see if it is.

Sapphire have adhered to the reference design, the only difference between a Built-by-ATI card and this one is the color of the board and the cooler design. This means that not only does the card look exactly the same as its predecessor did, it also sports the same amount of transistors (157 million) and it was fabricated with the same 90 nm process. The only differences are the clock speeds – the GPU clock is set at 587 MHz and the memory clocks at 693 Mhz.

RING BUS MEMORY CONTROLLER
256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads
Programmable intelligent arbitration logic
Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs
Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)
Fast Z-Buffer Clear
Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering

ULTRA-THREADED SHADER ENGINE
Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders
Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations
Up to 128 simultaneous pixel threads
Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control
Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency
3Dc+ texture compression
High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats
High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats
Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
Render to vertex buffer support
Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0

ADVANCED IMAGE QUALITY FEATURES
64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline
Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline
Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes
Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode
Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV
2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
Up to 128-tap texture filtering
Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options
High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

AVIVO VIDEO AND DISPLAY PLATFORM
High performance programmable video processor
MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding
DXVA support
De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion
Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion)
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
HDR tone mapping acceleration
Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output
Flexible display support
DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready
Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output
Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display
High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs
Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
Xilleon TV encoder for high quality analog output
YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays
Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays
Fast, glitch-free mode switching
VGA mode support on all outputs
Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550

CROSSFIRE
Multi-GPU technology
Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance)
Supertiling (optimal load-balancing)
Scissor (compatibility)
Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality)

The display outputs are the standard two DVI outputs (Dual link compatible) and a TV out. The card is AVIVO enabled, which allows it to display high definition content as well as accelerate its playback.

Once we open up the package, we find the card wrapped in a protective bag. Under the card the rest of the package contents can be found. They include the manual, the driver CD and PowerDVD 6 CD, The DaVinci Code game disk and the usual extra cables.