Powercolor 1600XTBRAVO256 Video Card

PowerColor Computer INC. was founded in 1999, and has since become a renowned manufacturer of "Powered by ATI" graphics cards. ATI leads the industry in producing graphics, video, and multimedia products for desktop PCs, workstations, servers, gaming consoles, and cell phones. This past fall, ATI and its graphics board manufacturing partners introduced to the world the first ever GPU built on 90nm architecture, labeled the X1K series. PowerColor released a spectrum of ATI GPUs built on the 90nm process, ranging from the flagship X1900XTX down to the X1300 for your regular computer user.  Not everyone needs the ultra-powerfull X1900XTX and spending $500.00 on it may be out of the question.  This is where the mid-range X1600 XTBRAVO 256 MB, part of the GameFX Board Series, comes into the picture.  It has enough horsepower to play games and a price tag that's easy on the wallet.

The X1600 XT chipset features ATI's newest technologies including Avivo™ video perfection, GDDR3, and High-Dynamic Range Lighting(HDR) support. Please come along as HardwareLogic beats up this X1600XT, and get a glimpse at what it can REALLY do.

"The Radeon X1600 XT is designed to deliver outstanding entertainment and 3D graphics through its unique ultra-threaded core architecture and ATI's Avivo™ video and display technology.  The Radeon X1600 XT is a perfect way to to connect your PC and consumer electronic devices together for an ideal home entertainment and gaming system.  Built for the future, the Radeon X1600 XT is CrossFire™ Ready to deliver the ultimate gaming performance that works with all games." -Powercolor

ATI Avivo Technology:

• "ATI's Avivo is the new hreference for advanced imaging and video with revolutionary technologies ideal for enthusiasts of media PCs, HDTV, HD discs and digital photography."
• "Get high image fidelity with CRT and LCD displays, TVs, rear projection and plasma TVs, as well as projectors. ATI Avivo introduces new life to colors across the entire spectrum with an advanced 10-bit-per-color display engine."
• "ATI Avivo enhances your digital video and photos, creating sharp images, crip text, and vivid color. Boost the video quality captured by your Media PC and PVR with advanced 3D comb filtering and automatic gain control."
• "ATI Avivo's high definition video playback enters the realm of high-end home theater systems. Free your CPU to power other applications with ATI Avivo's hardware accelerated processing of new HD video formats, including H.264, for stutter-free playback."

We can see the X1600XT chipset is feature rich.  PowerColor has taken this mid-range card and rigged it with 256MB of high-end GDDR3.  The weakness of the memory architecture is its 128-bit width, which may create a bottleneck when running games with lots of eye candy (anti-aliasing, adaptive anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering).  This X1600XT means serious business.  It has a 600MHz GPU and a 1400MHz memory clock - so it has plenty of raw horse-power when it comes to processing frames.

Now we're going to take a closer look at the X1600XTBRAVO 256MB.

The PowerColor X1600XTVRAVO comes packaged in a sturdy compact retail box. Accessories included in the retail box are: CyberLink DVD Solution, ATI Driver CD, User Manual, S-Video Cable, DVI--> VGA Dongle, HDTV Cable, Composite Cable, VIVO Cable, and last but not least an S-Video Cable.

My personal opinion on the CyberLink DVD Solution is that it's one of the better software DVD players available. This particular version includes support for six-channel audio and H.264 High-Definition video encoding and decoding.

I found the red colored DVI--> VGA dongle to be neat.  It shows what kind of quality went into building this card and its accessories on behalf of PowerColor.

The PowerColor X1600XT's stature is compact and should fit into any case or enclosure with ease.

For connection to display devices, the X1600XTBRAVO is outfitted with dual DVI-D ports and one S-Video port. Basically, between the three connections this card can be connected to an array of display devices including digital LCDs, analog LCDs, regular television sets and HDTVs.

Now lets take a look at the heart and mind of this card.

Here we have it, the RV530 XT core, which is built on a 90 nm process. This folks, is the heart and mind of the X1600XT. XT cores are the cream of the crop among X1600 GPUs . From the silicon wafer of X1600 cores, ATI takes the ones capable of running the highest frequency, and makes them XTs. To put it in perspective, the XT GPUs are clocked 100MHz higher then the X1600Pro. Upon removing the stock heatsink, the core was covered in silver thermal interface material (TIM). I applied Arctic Clean TIM cleaner and eventually I managed to clean the core enough to reveal the writings.

The PowerColor X1600XT uses 1.4ns Infineon GDDR3, its part number is HYB18H256321AF-14. This GDDR3 package is 256MB in 8 modules at 32MB each. The data sheet on this GDDR3 can be found here, but unless you are an engineer alot of that informaiton won't mean much.  What information you should know is that this card is outfitted with some of the best GDDR3 made, and running at 700MHz, it is capable of indredible throughput, up to 64.0Gbytes/s.

"ATI RAGE THEATER is a single chip, multi-standard video encoder/decoder that elevates video on the PC to the next level of integration, performance and affordability. Its advanced processing features are designed to generate a superior video out image, making it particularly suited for applications such as TV Web browsing."~ATI

The Rage Theater chip is one of a kind in the graphics card market and found only on VIVO edition ATI cards. Rage Theatre takes the multimedia experience to an entire new level on the PC. Its DVD playback was on the level of HDTV in my opinion. Pristine clear would be a good phrase to describe image quality produced by this card. ATI image quality is big factor in many people's decision tom spend their hard earned money on ATI cards.

Now lets have a look at the stock heatsink.

PowerColor went the extra mile to fit the X1600XT BRAVO with a decent heatink.  The 50mm fan does a sufficient job in keeping the heatink cool and when under a load of benchmarks and games, this heatsink is just warm to the touch.  Personally, I found the fan noise to be moot, and I could not hear it from about 3 feet away in the open air HSPC Tech Station; the 92mm Panaflo Medium RPM fan drowned out any noise it made.  From my past experience, this fan is not loud enough to be heard outside of a case.

Here I disassembled the heatsink and what you see below is the acrylic top that guides air through the heatsink fins.

And here the bare heatsink without the acrylic top.

Though the heatsink is Aluminum, I think it's well suited for the X1600XT.  Will an after market heatsink be better? Of Course.

3DMark06 is best suited for the latest generation of DirectX 9.0c graphics cards. It is the first benchmark to require hardware support for Pixel Shaders 3.0. By combining high quality 3D tests, CPU tests, feature tests, image quality tools, and much more, 3DMark06 is a premium benchmark for evaluating the latest generation of gaming hardware.

3DMark05 is best suited for the latest generation of DirectX 9.0 graphics cards. It is the first benchmark to require a DirectX9.0 compliant hardware with support for Pixel Shaders 2.0 or higher! By combining high quality 3D tests, CPU tests, feature tests, image quality tools, and much more, 3DMark05 is a premium benchmark for evaluating the latest generation of gaming hardware.

2005's Game of the Year. F.E.A.R. is a paranormal action thriller presented entirely in first person, an unprecedented adrenaline rush of close quarters combat seamlessly melded with spine-tingling, shocking intensity of the unknown.

Doom 3 is an "older" game that still is a good benchmarking tool as it highly stresses your entire system. For benchmarking we use TimeDemo1.

The HardwareOC FarCry Benchmark is an easy-to-use tool, that makes Far Cry video card benchmarking fast and easy. In 2004 Far Cry earned the "Best Game of the Year" award because of its awesome graphics and gameplay. It was the first game with Pixel Shader 3 support, which later became a standard in many other games. For testing we use Hardware OC's Far Cry Benchmark v1.43. to test the X1900 we used Ubisoft's Regulator Demo at 1024x768.

The X1600XT proved to be a decent gamer. The most demanding game, F.E.A.R, did bog down our PowerColor X1600XT when running high levels of HDR lighting and other eye-candy at 1280x1024. The bottom line is this, PowerColor X1600XT is sufficient for gaming unless playing at resolutions greater then 1280x1024 with heavy details.  I enjoy running the X1600XT to play Counter-Strike:Source, it doesn't generate a lot of heat compared to high-end cards and runs the game with maxed eye-cady at 1024x768.

Overclocking

When buying a mid-range card such as the Powercolor X1600XT, overclocking may or may not be on your mind.  If overclocking IS on your mind, then perhaps the Powercolor X1600XT is not the best choice. Our PowerColor X1600XT BRAVO overclocked 13MHz to 600MHz on the core and was stable, while the memory was not stable with any overclock.

Warranty and Support

PowerColor offers a comprehensive technical support page. A toll free numberis also available for technical support: To access Tech Support PLUS you need to register your PowerColor card, registering is also necessary for DIRECT RMA service

Our Recommendation

The Powercolor X1600XT BRAVO sets the standard for  mid-range graphics. The PoweColor is an excellent choice for folks who do not need the performance of a high-priced X1800X1900 cards. The PowerColor X1600XT BRAVO is going to satisfy all users EXCEPT your hardcore gamers and benchmarkers.