Just a few weeks ago ATI released their first video card that used a GPU constructed under an 80nm production process. We are referring to the X1950 PRO, ATI’s newest midrange video card. The X1950 PRO, which uses an RV570 GPU, introduced a number of new innovations. Most interesting was the new method of handling Crossfire technology. ATI’s new approach to Crossfire which debuted with the release of the X1950 PRO has done away with the requirements of master cards. In addition, ATI has opted upon getting rid of the external Crossfire dongle and instead chosen a much more NVIDIA-like method, the use internal bridges to connect two cards in Crossfire mode. Yes, we said “bridges”. Contrary to SLI, the new Crossfire approach uses not one, but two bridges to connect multiple GPUs. The reason behind this is that multiple bridges will supposedly offer more advanced bandwidth than would be possible using just one.

Today our article is about the X1650 XT, ATI’s newest video card part of the X1650 family. The X1650 XT is based on the RV560 core, which is ATI’s second GPU to be manufactured under an 80nm manufacturing process. The ATI Radeon X1650 XT also uses the same revised Crossfire approach as the X1950 PRO.

Radeon X1650XT in Crossfire configuration

The Radeon X1650 XT is aimed towards the lower mid-range sector of the market. We can better understand the market segment this card fits into by looking at its price. The MSRP for the X1650 XT is 149 USD. By looking at competing NVIDIA solutions, the one most similar in price is the 7600 GT, which is available for 10 USD less at a price of $139. Because of their similar prices, the X1650 XT’s main NVIDIA competitor is naturally the 7600 GT. Both are aimed at the same market segment and are similar in terms of features. The card the X1650 XT is replacing, the X1650 PRO, is now available at the budget price of 99 USD. The GeForce 7900 GS, another potential competitor, has been cut down to the priced of 109 USD.

As can be seen in the table, all of the video cards have a 128bit bus width. The average size of the video memory is 256 Mbytes, however, some solutions from partners of NVIDIA or ATI might have the cards come with 512 Mbytes of video memory.

The main difference between the X1650 XT and the X1650 PRO is the difference in GPUs. For the X1650 XT, ATI has doubled the pixel shading units, going from 12 to 24, and also doubled the amount of TMU and ROPs. Memory bandwidth, however, has not been changed. Surprising enough, the core and memory clock speeds for the X1650 XT have also been reduced. The core clock has been reduced 10 MHz and the memory clock has been reduced 20 MHz. Despite this, for the most part the X1650 XT has a very large number of technical improvements over the X1650 PRO. From taking a look at the X1650 XT’s specifications, we can already tell that it will be able to easily outperform its predecessor the X1650 PRO.