The Radeon X1650 Pro is an interesting product from ATI and it is really going a long way in helping them become more competitive in the affordable mid-range arena. The only concern I have for the X1650 Pro comes down to pricing. While the X1650 Pro performs much like a GeForce 7600GS, it is actually priced to compete with the 7600GT, which is not an ideal scenario. That said the ATI image quality is very good, and in the latest and greatest games I have found the X1650 Pro to perform quite well. However, another aspect that lets down the X1650 Pro is its overclocking performance, which is far inferior to that of the 7600GS.

Nevertheless, there are already a number of Radeon X1650 Pro products available, many coming from well known manufacturers such as Gigabyte. In fact with the Gigabyte version you get quite a lot of graphics card for $130 US. Built using the RV530 architecture, the Radeon X1650 Pro uses a 90nm design process and is the highest clock part using this core. With a core clock of 600MHz there is little head room left when it comes time to overclock. The memory operates at 1400MHz DDR which provides the X1650 Pro with a healthy memory bandwidth of 22.4GB/s.

The only problem with the Radeon X1650 Pro being clocked so high is that when under full load, the X1650 Pro uses almost 160 watts of power, which is almost 40 watts more than the 7600GS. That means to deliver much the same performance the X1650 Pro requires 33% more power than the 7600GS, making it a rather inefficient product in that sense. Nevertheless, despite the thermal output of the X1650 Pro, this Gigabyte version features a completely passive cooling setup using their Silent-Pipe II Technology.

Obviously Gigabyte strongly believes that their Silent-Pipe II Technology can rise to the occasion. Extracting heat from the core is a large copper heatsink that utilizes just two heatpipes. These heatpipes connect to two different clusters of aluminum fins. There are a total of twenty fins on the front side of the graphics card. Using a dual slot design these fins are vented externally through the rear of the desktop case. On the back side of the graphics card there are thirty aluminum fins that are designed to catch air-flow from the CPU cooler or case fan.

The Silent-Pipe II design not only looks very impressive, it is very impressive. Despite the thermal output of the Radeon X1650 Pro, this fan-less Gigabyte design did well. Of course it is important to have some kind of air-flow over at least one of the two groups of fins. I used a 120mm case fan that was in range of the fins on the rear side of the card. Although the heatpipes were quite hot to touch, the graphics card did remain perfectly stable for the entire testing phase.

Gigabyte has outfitted their Radeon X1650 Pro with 256MB of GDDR3 memory using Infineon “HYB18H512321AF-14” memory chips. These memory chips are rated for 1400MHz DDR, so given this is the frequency at which they are operating at on the Gigabyte Radeon X1650 Pro, I do not imagine there will be a great deal of overclocking headroom left in them. That said, we already know the Radeon X1650 Pro does not overclock well, so it is not important if the memory cannot either.

Given this is a reasonably low budget graphics card, I was impressed with the package. Gigabyte has included two DVI dongles, along with a high-quality TV-Out adapter. Along with the users manual and drivers CD there is also a full version copy of Civilization IV, which is a nice little bonus. Included on the driver CD is the Gigabyte overclocking and monitoring software know as V-Tuner 3, Direct X9.0c and Power DVD revision 6. Overall, the Gigabyte Radeon X1650 Pro is an impressive looking graphics card with a neat little package, now let’s see how it performs.