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

by Steve Kerrison on 28 June 2006, 10:24

Tags: ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaf4v

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GECUBE Radeon X1600XT, Dual DVI, 256MB GDDR3, AVIVO Edition

GECUBE brings to the table an X1600XT with memory clocks very slightly below normal: 1368MHz, a deficit of 18MHz which shouldn't have a huge impact on performance. As with the ASUS card, GECUBE's features 256MiB of onboard memory.

GeCube X1600XT Front

Fan cooling is in play this time, with an ordinary single-slot-taking, copper-finned solution. This keeps GECUBE's SKU from getting in the way of your add-in card plans.

GeCube X1600XT Front

Given that all the cooling is happening around the front of the PCB, the back is fairly sparse, with just a run-of-the-mill retention mechanism for the heatsink.

GeCube X1600XT Outputs

The backplane features dual dual-link DVI connectors, much to our delight, along with video out. You can run two 2560x1600-capable Dell 3007WFP displays off this one card, you know.

GeCube X1600XT Bundle

This is a product geared slightly more towards home theater than gaming, evident in its bundle. Alongside the manual is PowerDVD 6, albeit a 2-channel audio version. The other side is a driver disc, with drivers from the dark ages of 2005 (Catalyst 5.11s, no less). Most people will probably go straight to ATI's website for drivers anyway, but such dated drivers could be a pain for those who trust the bundle.

There are component video cables for connection to an HDTV, along with a composite/S-video output cable. However, there's no video input for this card. There is also the usual DVI-DSUB dongle, as well.