Power Color, Sapphire release X1650XT

IT WILL sell for just $149 - a very attractive price and our first scores shows it's actually slower than R520 based X1800GTO card. It will be cheaper and can give 7600 GT a fight but not without a casualties.

So what is it?

The Power Color Radeon X1650XT is clocked at 600MHz core and 1400MHz memory. This card uses 128 bit GDDR 3 memory only, has eight real pipelines and twenty four shader units. It supports Vista and it is HDCP ready. The RV560 is an 80 nanometre chip heavily delayed and it also supports the CrossFire Bridge Interconnect, dual way - the same as on the RV570 cards.

Power Colour also announced the AGP version to follow up later with the similar specification and to cost $170 - just $20 more than the native, non Rialto card.

Sapphire also announced its X1650XT cards but with modest specs. It clocked its core to 575MHz and memory to 1350MHz. It will produce both 256MB and 512MB cards and Sapphire uses 128 bit memory. It will also cost $149 in the US and spookily enough €149 in €uroland.

The cards should be available by the end of November. µ