LOSTCIRCUITS

In the end, marketing only goes so far and at some point, reality catches up and the benchmark results are the show and tell of what is the poodle's core. Understandably, nobody can expect miracles from a graphics card with a retail price in the range of $130-150 and there is the extra bonus of support for Shader Model 3.0. The problem still is that, yes - it is nice to look at the pictures -- but are they actually moving?

This is discounting the visual artifacts, quite honestly the most annoying feature of the X1600 Pro. Granted, there is a chance that what we observed is a specific compatibility issue with the test setup - but then, we have run many cards on this system and none other ever showed the same problem. The other possibility is that this could be the first worm that rears its ugly head with an entire can to follow. We are still awaiting feedback on these issues.

Based on what we found during our testing, we are very reluctant to recommend the X1600 Pro to anybody. Even if the price is very competitive, there is still a lot of truth to the old von Bismarck quote: "We are way too poor to buy something cheap" and the X1600 Pro seems to be a perfect example for that.

On the other hand, one thing to be very clear about, the problems we saw have nothing to do with SapphireTech since they are intrinsic to the ATI architecture per se and will be found in all vendor's solutions.

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