PowerColor X1600 Pro Video Card Review

You get done reading all that crap?  Good.  Holy crap, ATI sure knows how to load down their customers with info don’t they?  They also repeated themselves a few times there, in case you didn’t notice.  But, I’m not their writer, I work for the OCModshop, so I’ll do my best to do my duty for the nerds of my country.  Let’s rip this card a new one.

First, it’s not the latest and greatest.  It only supports DirectX 9.0c, which means that the chances of using it with Vista are slim to none with great efficiency.  With a little tweaking you might be able to squeeze some extra juice out of it, but I would recommend using this card with Windows XP.  Sometimes I think those guys at Microsoft are just looking to piss me off, but then I remember DOS, shudder, then thank the powers that be for Mr. Gates.

Inside the box is the card itself, a DVI to VGA adapter, a Quick Installation Guide, software CD, Cyberlink DVD, S-Video and composite video cable.

All in all, the X1600 is something of a nutcase.  It is much better than many mid-range cards on the market, but falls short in many areas.  I installed the software and drivers, then shut my computer down.  I installed the card, booted up my computer, and let XP do its thing.  I am testing on my daily driver, which consists of an AMD Athlon X2 3800+, 2GB of Kingston DDR2, and a 500GB Seagate SATA HD.  I also have a dual boot on my PC that allows me to use XP for just such a test.  Once everything was squared away, I loaded up Fallout 3 to check out what the card was capable of.

Running at 1026×786, the video quality was superb.  I was actually very impressed with the pixel shading that this DX 9.0c card supplied.  Fallout runs much better on Vista, but with the right equipment a run on XP is still a beautiful sight.  So I changed the resolution up a little.  At 1280×1024 the quality was still very nice, but I noticed a little choppiness in the highly “populated” areas of the game.

One of the things that impressed me about the X1600 was how cool it stayed during all of that play.  When I start a game I usually forget where I am or what I’m doing until something snaps me out of it.  You can only imagine how long my tests take.  So after 3 hours I realized that I was supposed to be testing a card.  I exited the game and shut my system down.  Using my laser thermometer I got a reading of 22 degrees Celsius.  ATI used a very thin fan/heatsink combo on this model, which takes up less space and allows adequate cooling in tight conditions.