The card and bundle

The card arrived at the office packaged in a Powercolor-standard size white box. The box art, which you can see above, will be used on all retail cards.


The red card comes with a medium-sized black heatsink, which should do a good job of keeping the card cool. Unfortunately, even though the heatsink stretches over the memory in size, it does not cool it, as there is no thermal interface material (pad/paste) between the chips and the heatsink.

At stock, the core runs at 600 MHz, the memory at 700 MHz (1400MHz effectively). As you may have noticed, the card's pipeline count is identical to that of the X1600 XT (12 PS units, 4 ROPs). The memory communicates with the core over a 128-bit interface.

In terms of size, the card is about comparable to the X800GT, and so it should be no problem installing the card in any enclosure. I am also glad to see that the card has two DVI connectors as well as a VIVO connector.

The Radeon X1650 PRO gets all its juice through the PCI-Express slot, no additional power connector is necessary.


The bundle consists of:

• Powercolor Radeon X1650 PRO
• Driver CD
• Cyberlink DVD solution CD
• Quick installation guide
• DVI to VGA adapter
• VIVO cabling

Installation

Installation: open up the case, insert the card into the PCI-Express slot, screw down the metal tab, fire up the system and install the drivers.

As usual, everything went smoothly. The fan is very silent, I had to unplug some fans in the case in order to hear it.

I tried overclocking the card, but unfortunately, I was unsuccessful. I tried several programs. With the latest beta of ATI Tool, the card would raise clocks, but as soon as the change was confirmed, ATI Tool would crash. Also, by however much I tried to raise clocks, the card would just reset itself using VPU recover whenever I launched a benchmark. I think that we will have to wait for more advanced tools in order to overclock the new X1650 series.

The test system

The test system used was the following: