We’ve been very impressed with Ati’s high end cards over recent months but there’s been a gaping hole in its product line in the $250 mark for some time: Nvidia’s 7600-series cards have proven to be the best price-performance combination. Ati’s X1600 series just couldn’t compete.
The X1650 Pro is another increment in what’s becoming an increasingly fragmented and confusing series. To make matters worse the X1650 Pro is available in two flavours: one with GDDR2 memory and the other (like this one) with GDDR3. Both flavours have 256MB of 128-bit memory.
The original X1600 XT was poor and GeCube’s X1650 Pro is not a massive upgrade. The core clock speed has been boosted 10Mhz to 600Mhz and the memory clock has increased to 740MHz. There are still five vertex shaders and twelve pixel shaders.
In our medium (1280 x 1024) tests it averaged 21fps in Far Cry and 23fps in Call of Duty 2 (CoD2). In other words it made no difference to Far Cry over an X1600 XT and provided a 5fps boost in CoD2. None of these scores are playable.
The fan is an unobtrusive whoosh and GeCube bundles no software: keeping the price down. Ati believes this card will rival Nvidia’s 7600 GS but it’s $50 more expensive (with similar performance). Nvidia’s 7600 GT is significantly more powerful and $40 cheaper. However, if you want to stick with Ati for the excellent AVIVO features, video transcoding and ability to use HDR and antialiasing at the same time, we recommend choosing an X1800 GTO. These now cost just $30 more and play all games at 1280 x 1024. Ati’s aggressive price drops have returned to bite it in the bottom.
