LOSTCIRCUITS

The Card

The Sapphire X1600 Pro HDMI is, as its name indicates, based on the mid-range X1600Pro GPU from ATI. The GPU is clocked at 500 MHz and the 256 MB of GDDR3 is clocked at 800 MHz (400 MHz x 2). It is a low-profile PCI-E 16X card with dual video output (HDMI and VGA) and an external RCA SPDIF input plus an internal SPDIF input. That’s right, the card has SPDIF inputs to connect to your motherboard or soundcard’s SPDIF out. The sound will then be sent over the HDMI connection with the video signal. The X1600 Pro HDMI is Crossfire Ready. The X1600 Pro HDMI draws all power from the PCI-E 16X slot; no external power connector is needed.

The bundle is well thought out, including an HDMI cable, HDMI to DVI adapter, internal cable for connecting SPDIF to the card, and low-profile slot covers that enable the card to be mounted in a low-profile case with all connections accessible. The software bundle consists of a driver CD, the 2-channel OEM version of PowerDVD 6, and Sapphire’s 4-in-1 game DVD, from which you can play each game for an hour, and choose one game to have for free. The only thing that might have been helpful that Sapphire did not include is a short single RCA cable for external routing of SPDIF into the X1600 Pro HDMI.

       

       

It may be handy to use a soundcard that features Dolby Digital or DTS encoding with the X1600 Pro HDMI. While a standard soundcard or onboard sound with SPDIF out can easily pass through the multichannel compressed digital soundtrack from a DVD, SPDIF does not have enough bandwidth to send more than two channels of sound in uncompressed PCM format. Stereo sound from the computer will go through just fine, but multichannel sound from a game cannot travel over SPDIF without alteration. A sound card that does Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect can take the sound generated by the computer (stereo or multichannel) and encode it into a stream that can travel over SPDIF (and in this case, SPDIF over HDMI) to an AV receiver. Perhaps the future will bring a standard for uncompressed multichannel audio to be passed from soundcard to video card and output via HDMI with the video.

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