ATI Radeon X1650 Pro: Sapphire vs HIS

Sapphire Radeon X1650 Pro

The Sapphire X1650 pro has a single slot, mostly made out of copper cooler, sports 256MB of  GDDR3 and has two DVI connectors and a combined TV-out/component port. The card works on the frequencies set by ATI, 600MHz for the GPU and 700MHz for the memory. The card lacks an extra power connector, as the power supplied by the PCI-Expres slot is enough for this chip. When you take a closer look at the heatsink you can see that this does not cool the memory chips,  although at first glance it seems that it does. The cooler is reasonably quiet, and the card can be used in a CrossFire setup without the need for a master card. 

Next to the usual driver CD we found a CD with Cyberlinks Power DVD, a DVI to D-sub connector and a component cable. To keep the price as low as possible no games are bundled with the card.

We were able to overclock the card slightly, the GPU could go to 635MHz, the memory to 783MHz, not too impressive. The 3DMark 06 score went up to 2808 from 2616 when overclocked, an increase of only 7.3%.