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Date: October 12th, 2006
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Sapphire
<--SHOP FOR A SAPPHIRE X1650 PRO VIDEOCARD HERE

 

PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS & FEATURES

Features

• 157 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process

• Dual-link DVI

• Twelve pixel shader processors

• Five vertex shader processors

• 128-bit 4-channel DDR/DDR2/GDDR3 memory interface

• Native PCI Express x16 bus interface

  • AGP 8x configurations also supported with AGP-PCI-E external bridge chip

• Dynamic Voltage Control
  

Ring Bus Memory Controller

• 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads

• Programmable intelligent arbitration logic

• Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs

• Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test

• Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)

• Fast Z-Buffer Clear

• Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering
  

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine

• Support for Microsoft® Direct X‚® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware

• Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations

• Up to 128 simultaneous pixel threads

• Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control

• Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency

• 3Dc+ texture compression

  • High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats

  • High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats

• Multiple Render Target (MRT) support

• Render to vertex buffer support

• Complete feature set also supported in Open GL‚® 2.0
  

Advanced Image Quality Features

• 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline

  • Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing

• 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline

  • Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing

• 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes

  • Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling

  • New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes

  • Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode

  • Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

• 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes

  • Up to 128-tap texture filtering

  • Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options

• High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)
  

Avivo Video and Display Platform

• High performance programmable video processor

  • Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding

  • DXVA support

  • De-blocking and noise reduction filtering

  • Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion

  • Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing

  • 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion)

• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time

• HDR tone mapping acceleration

  • Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output

• Flexible display support

  • DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready **

  • Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs

  • 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output

  • Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color)

  • Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display

  • High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs

  • Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays

  • Xilleon TV encoder for high quality analog output

  • YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays*

  • Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays

  • Fast, glitch-free mode switching

  • VGA mode support on all outputs

  • Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates

• Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550
  

CrossFire

• Multi-GPU technology

• Four modes of operation:

  • Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance)

  • Supertiling (optimal load-balancing)

  • Scissor (compatibility)

  • Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality)

PRODUCT COMPOSITION

As said earlier for around IS$120-US$140 you will receive the following.

First out of the box you will receive the usual user's manual and case sticker. The software included in this bundle includes a OEm version of PowerDVD (2 channel), along with a driver/installation CD. As a nice addition there is a game included as well. The Da Vinci Code PC Game is an interesting problem solving game for the gamer that wants a little more than a run around and shoot everyone type of game. This game, although not graphically intense, is a nice addition to get you up and going. If you know the book or the movie, you will enjoy this game. Nice to see Sapphire adding this to the bundle. This is something I greatly respect.

The bundled hardware is comprised of a HDTV dongle, two DVI to analog monitor adapters, a S-Video to composite video converter along with a length of composite video cable. Nothing fancy, but everything you will ever need.

And of course you will finally remove your new videocard from the box. This particular videocard is relatively small, but still comes with a full active cooling solution. The copper cooler attached to this VPU and videocard memory is more than adequate to cool this card. The copper cooler does add more heft to the card, but nothing that any PCI Express slot can handle with ease. There is only one problem encountered and I will cover that in the upcoming page.