ATI Radeon X1650 Update: Passive cooling and DDR2

Introduction

Recently we posted an article reviewing the Radeon X1650 Pro graphics cards by HIS and Sapphire. We have received cards by Gigabyte and MSI, and both manufacturers have tried to make something special out of their versions: Gigabytes effort uses a completely passive heatsink, where as MSI is utilizing DDR2 in stead of GDDR3 to keep the price as low as possible.

Gigabyte Radeon X1650 Pro Silent-Pipe II

The Silent-Pipe II heatsink is not new, Gigabyte uses it on quite a few of their mid-range graphics cards. It has now found its way to the new X1650 Pro offering. The GPU has a small copper heatsink, connected to two other heatsinks by heatpipes: one of these is placed on the other front of the card, the other is positioned vertically at the back of the card. Gigabyte chooses not to cool the memorychips, the Silent-Pipe II heatsink does not cover these.

The clock frequencies of the card are slightly lower than that of ATI's reference card, 590MHz for the core and 690MHz for the memory. It seems that even with these lower clocks the card can not function properly without some airflow; we normally test graphics cards in an open environment and had to use a 12cm fan to simulate case airflow to keep the card working. Gigabyte has definitely found the absolute limit with this card, as even with airflow we could not overclock the GPU at all in our testbed, and only managed to squeeze an extra 75MHz extra out of the memory.

The card sports 256MB of 1.4ns GDDR3 memory by Infineon, has two DVI connections and features a combined TV-out/component port. The X1650 Pro does not require an extra power connector, the PCI-Express slot on a motherboard supplies enough power for the card.

Gigabyte choses to bundle the card with the game Civilization IV, we think that is a very good choice. At the time of writing this review however this version of the X1650 Pro can not be found in our price overviews, so we do not know the actual retail price as of yet.