Introduction
ATI Radeon X1650 XT GPU?
We took a look at a trio of ATI Radeon X1650 Pro
retail cards a few months' ago and surmised that the RV530 architecture, comprising of a 5/4/4 (VS/PS/ROP) configuration and clocked in at 594/1386 core/memory, had a hard time cutting it at around the £90 mark, especially with NVIDIA's GeForce 7600 GS/GT cards providing stern competition and, frankly, a better, more compelling architecture.
ATI quietly slipped in the Radeon X1650
XT (RV560) just over a couple of weeks' ago and logical thinking would presume it's a faster-clocked X1650 Pro, right? Nope.
Radeon X1650 XT is a higher-end beast. It's based on a 8/8/8 (VS/PS/ROP) setup, so it's endowed with 24 pixel shaders (with 3 per PS unit), double the per-clock vertex shading power and an NVIDIA G73-matching and RV530-doubling 8 ROPs (pixel processing per clock). Radeon X1650 XT is also based on the same 80nm manufacturing process and features the internal CrossFire connectors we first saw on the
Radeon X1950 Pro but goes back to its it X1600-class roots by having a 128-bit memory path. Of course, the XT SKU features ATI's ringbus memory controller and Avivo video-processing engine, too.
Radeon X1650 XT, then, is a bit of everything. The processing power, 80nm production and internal CrossFire hint at X1950 Pro and the narrow memory bus brings it back in line with RV530. The logical assumption concludes that it's a crippled X1950 Pro core that's further stunted by a 128-bit memory bus.
The reference model is clocked in at 575MHz core and 1350MHz GDDR3 memory, so it should be comfortably faster than the X1650 Pro. Want to see what this hybrid GPU looks like in retail form? Flick on over to the next page.
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