HIS Overclocked Radeon X1600 Pro Turbo Review

Conclusions

Factory-overclocked Radeon X1600 Pro from HIS runs at the very same clock rates as Radeon X1600 XT. Since both chips have identical technical specs, we though that both would achieve a similar performance on our tests. This would be correct if they both had the same amount of video memory. With overclocked Radeon X1600 Pro carrying 128 MB and Radeon X1600 XT, 256 MB, the later achieved a performance up to 167.61% higher. While on old games with no image quality settings enable the performance difference is very small (up to 8%), on newer games and/or increasing image quality settings, the original 256 MB Radeon X1600 XT achieved a performance far higher.

But there is a huge price difference between them, though. While the 128 MB factory-overclocked Radeon X1600 Pro from HIS can be found by USD 127, 256 MB Radeon X1600 XT from other brands is found on the USD 167-USD 200 range.

This puts Radeon X1600 Pro Turbo from HIS competing with cards based on GeForce 6600 GT, and it was up to 91.14% faster than this model from NVIDIA, except in Doom 3: if you want only to play Doom 3, go for a NVIDIA-based solution.

It is also very interesting to note that PowerColor has a Radeon X800 GTO with 128 MB model being sold at the same price range of the reviewed video card from HIS (on our benchmark Radeon X800 GTO was up to 139.37% faster than the overclocked Radeon X1600 Pro from HIS, however it had 256 MB of video memory).

So, if you are looking for an ATI solution to counter GeForce 6600 GT, this model from HIS won’t let you down. However, we would seriously consider buying a 128 MB Radeon X800 GTO instead if we had up to USD 130 to spend on a video card.