Review: Complete ATI Radeon X1600 Roundup - Got £100 for a card? Read this!

Temperatures, Warranties and Pricing

We've looked at gaming performance, but given the differing cooling solutions, it would also be pertinent of us to take a look at cooling performance. A cool card is a happy card, as they say (well, as I say.)

To keep our testing as accurate as possible, we opted to measure temperatures via the cards' temperature monitoring facilities, accessible through the driver. However, a number of the cards didn't make this possible. Still, we found four cards that would play ball, these were Gigabyte's, the two MSI cards and Sapphire's Ultimate Edition, giving us one actively cooled, two completely passive and one fanned-heatpiped-passive jumble.

We measured temperatures at idle (at least 10 minutes of the system sat doing nothing) and under load (one run of the 3DMark05 game tests @ 1920x1200, 4xAA 8xAF). Given the sensitivity of passively cooled systems to case cooling qualities, we also set up 'good' and 'poor' airflow conditions. In good conditions, we had an 120mm Akasa fan blowing air over the CPU area and back of the graphics card. There was another 120mm exhausting air from behind the CPU. For 'poor' conditions we took out the fan over the CPU/graphics card, leaving just the exhaust fan.

During testing, ambient temperatures changed, so we've recorded them and expressed GPU temperatures as their amount above ambient, keeping the results as fair as possible given the circumstances.

Looking at the 'poor' airflow results, we can see how completely passive solutions are much more affected by the lack of air movement across them, which is no surprise. The best performing, in terms of temperature above ambient, appears to be Sapphire's unique cooling solution. It betters the MSI's regular fan cooler with good airflow and just about equals it in poorer conditions.

Gigabyte's passive solution performs slightly better than MSI's, but then Gigabyte does seem to have a lot more heatsink on its card, slapped just about everywhere it could find a space. The lesson to be learned here is an obvious one: passive cards are going to run hot, especially if you don't think about decent case cooling.

For its balance between silence and cooling performance, of the cards we temperature-tested, we liked Sapphire's solution the best. It's a shame we weren't able to include all cards in the testing, but hopefully we've given you some kind of scope to help you decide what type of cooling you'd be happy with.

Warranties and Pricing

They all work fine. They all have similar performance. We've already covered cooling and bundle differences, so we're left with pricing and warranties, two factors that are just as important as all the rest. We investigated these for you, and here they are in a comparison table:

We were unable to get all warranty info from MSI at the time of writing, and we got our hands on the Sapphire Ultimate Edition a little early and couldn't get the info we desired. However, the trend seems to be a 2 year warranty, with the supplier remaining responsible for receiving and replacing/arranging repair of the card. If you like to hang on to your cards, ASUS and Gigabyte offer three year warranties, but only Gigabyte's is transferrable, should you fancy selling on the card.

The cheapest card, by far, is HIS's Radeon X1600Pro. Thanks to its core and its overclocks, it's both cheap and fast enough to keep up with the XTs. MSI's cards come across as a little expensive, as does Gigabyte's (although it has some fatarse heatsinks and VIVO - perhaps justification) with the remainders sitting somewhere near £105, all averages considered.

Also a mention for the cheapest passively cooled card. That'd be the ASUS, which competes with its non-passive brothers price-wise.

So, no shockers there really, but a few differences that could shift the cards' appeal, depending on what your looking for, and there's certainly enough in the way of price difference to make some cards more attractive than others.