Sapphire X1600 Pro PCIe Video Card Review

The Sapphire X1600 Pro Naked

The particular X1600 Pro that we have here from Sapphire is the 256MB PCI- Express model. Sapphire offers three memory choices on the X1600 Pro, the 512MB DDRII, 256MB DDRII, and 128MB DDR III. For those not yet ready to switch to PCI-E they also offer an AGP version of the card.

The card itself in our opinion looks great. The dark blue PCB and white heatsink with the dark mask sets it apart from other cards with “plain” colors and heatsinks. Not only does it look great it performs well. Only during the POST sequence did we ever hear the fan and the whole card ran very cool. It strikes the perfect balance between a giant passive heatpipe cooler, and a larger cooler with a louder fan. The X1600 Pro is a low power video card and does not require the additional PCI-Express power adapter.

Taking off the all aluminum heatsink reveals the GPU core. It looks they gave us plenty of thermal paste! The GPU core clock speed is 500MHz. In this picture you can see that the memory uses thermal pads to transfer the heat.

On the back of the card the memory doesn’t have a heatsink but is not really a concern as the memory stays very cool.

The memory used on our card is Hynix brand. After digging around Hynix’ site we found that the max speed that this memory is rated for is 800MHz, which happens to be the speed it’s running on our card.

For connections we have a VGA, S-Video, and a Dual Link DVI.

Now that we know the specs, let’s how that translates to performance.