HIS Radeon X1600 Pro AGP Review

Introduction

With VGA manufacturers releasing only PCI Express-based video cards, owners of AGP-based PCs were simply forgotten. Even though you can find quite easily AGP VGAs on the market, AGP users cannot find the latest releases for the AGP platform. For those who have an AGP-based motherboard, HIS is an oasis in the middle of the desert: they have just released an AGP-based Radeon X1600 Pro, which should satisfy owners of AGP-based PCs that are anxious to see new VGA models being released for this platform. Let’s see how the performance of this Radeon X1600 ProAGP from HIS is.

Figure 1: HIS Radeon X1600 Pro AGP.

As you can see in Figure 1, this model is part of IceQ series from HIS, where the video card uses a special cooler manufactured by Arctic Cooling that pulls hot air from inside the computer case to the outside.

Radeon X1600 Pro is a mid-range chip from ATI Radeon X1000 series, supporting Shader 3.0 (DirectX 9.0c) programming model. Its official specs include a 500 MHz clock rate, a 780 MHz memory clock rate, a 128-bit memory interface and 12 pixel shader units.

We ran PowerStrip software to check what clock rates this video card was using, and it was running at 792 MHz and not at 780 MHz – which is just a 1.5% increase and should not provide any considerable performance increase. Funny enough HIS lists this card as having its memory accessed at 800 MHz (in fact its memory chips can run up to 800 MHz).

You can see in our tutorial “ATI Chips Comparison Table” the difference between this chip and the other chips from ATI, while on our tutorial “NVIDIA Chips Comparison Table” you can compare it to its competitors from NVIDIA.

You can take a look at Radeon X1600 Pro AGP from HIS at Figures 2 and 3.

Figure 2: HIS Radeon X1600 Pro IceQ AGP.

Figure 3: HIS Radeon X1600 Pro IceQ AGP, back view.

Let’s now take a closer look at the Radeon X1600 Pro IceQ AGP from HIS.