Fast but cheap X1600 PRO 512MB AGP card emerges

WE DON'T play that much with AGP cards anymore. A lot of our readers claim that they are old and obsolete but we don't agree with them. A lot of you out there still have an AGP system and want to upgrade. Cards such as Power Color X1600PRO AGP with 512MB of memory sound like the right choice at least from the specs but we trust in benchmarketing more than the tick box numbers. This card won't cost you much money either.

The card works at 500MHz core and uses the RV530 graphic core. It has four physical pipelines but it can do twelve Shader operations per clock - this is enough to beat aa 6600 GT but not the new and much more expensive 7800 GS. The card uses the rather modest 800MHz DDR 2 memory and has a good old floppy power connector on. The massive 512MB of memory is-128 bit but it does the job.

The card has one VGA and one DVI slot and of course an S-video in and out port. It supports AGP 8X port and since RV530 chip is native PCIe solution in uses Rialto Bridge to make it possible.

The box includes driver CD, Cyberlink eight application CD, quick installation guide, a single DVI dongle and S video to composite cable.

We decided to overclock the card and we were very surprised with the results. We overclocked it from the default 500MHz core and 800MHz memory to a massive 600MHz core and 945MHz memory. There is a special overclocking BIOS but you can overclock the card with an ATI or similar overclocking tool, a BIOS change is not required.

We decided not to test it at 2048x1536 as you cannot get any playable scores at such high resolutions.

Benchmarketing
We used:
Athlon X2 4800+ 2x 2400 MHz
Abit AV8 , K8T800 based motherboard
512 MB Corsair PC 3200 memory
Western Digital 8MB 160GB IDE drive
Akasa AK128 EVO Athlon 64 cooler
Akasa 650W multi rail PSU

Doom 3	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	47.6	33.0	24.7
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	53.6	38.9	28.9
?	?	?	?	?
Doom 3 High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	29.8	20.4	13.3
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	34.8	24.1	15.8
?	?	?	?	?
Far Cry	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	61.33	46.36	34.17	?
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	68.85	50.91	40.25	?
?	?	?	?	?
Far Cry High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	37.34	26.91	17.41	?
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	43.38	31.77	20.64	?
?	?	?	?	?
Half Life 2	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	58.74	48.70	42.14	?
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	63.07	57.15	49.06	?
?	?	?	?	?
Half Life 2 High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	41.39	26.58	20.73	?
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	45.61	31.76	24.65	?
?	?	?	?	?
Quake 4	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	80.4	56.6	43.1	?
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	90.5	66.3	49.7	?
?	?	?	?	?
Quake 4 High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	56.1	39.0	25.0	?
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	64.3	46.0	29.3	?
?	?	?	?	?
FEAR	1024x768	1280x960	1600x1200
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	41	30	19	?
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	46	33	24	?
?	?	?	?	?
FEAR High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x960	1600x1200
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	25	16	10	?
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	30	20	13	?
?	?	?	?	?
Composite Figures 3Dmark 03	3DMark 03	Game2	Game3	Nature
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	7255	50.8	43.3	50.9
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	8446	59.8	50.1	59.6
?	?	?	?	?
Composite Figures 3Dmark 03	Single Texturinng	Multi Textur.	Vertex Shader	Pixel Shader 2.0
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	1137.5	1953.0	35.3	46.3
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	1347.9	2345.0	41.1	54.5
?	?	?	?	?
Composite Figures 3Dmark 05	3DMark 05	Game1	Game2	Game3
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	4250	19.4	12.5	20.3
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	4953	22.3	14.7	23.7
?	?	?	?	?
Composite Figures 3Dmark 05	Single Texturinng	Multi Textur.	Pixel Shader	VS /VS complex
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	1237.0	1997.6	95.7	50.4/37.3
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	1460.8	2398.4	114.6	60.4/44.7
?	?	?	?	?
Composite Figures 3Dmark 06	3DMark 06	?	?
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	1913	?	?
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	2243	?	?
?	?	?	?	?
SM2.0 Test	Score	GT1	GT2
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	680	5.076	6.258
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	795	5.876	7.380
?	?	?	?	?
HDR/SM3.0 Test	Score	HDR1	HDR2
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	711	6.438	7.774
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	850	7.728	9.263
?	?	?	?	?
CPU Test	Score	CPU1	CPU2
Power Color X1600 PRO 500/800 MHz 512MB	1783	0.572	0.890
Power Color X1600 PRO 600/945 MHz 512MB	1851	0.583	0.940
?	?	?	?	?

There is no need to say that the overclocked card runs much faster than the non overclocked one. It gains up to six frames in Doom 3 while it can score up to five frames faster with FSAA and Aniso on. You gain up to fifteen percent when you overclock.

You can get up to seven frames in Far Cry and up to six when you turn FSAA on. Half life 2 loves the overclock and will gain up to nine frames and up to five frames with FSAA on.

Quake 4 consistently scores 10 frames faster some twelve percent performance increase and is very playable at 1280x1024. Quake 4 with FSAA and AA also likes the overclock and gets to decent 46 FPS at 12x10.

FEAR run up to five frames faster some eleven percent performance increase and you get the similar performance increase when you turn 4X FSAA and 16X Anisotropic filtering. 3Dmark03 gains 1200 marks from an overclock and gets to decent 8446 marks. 3dmark05 scores 703 marks faster and gets to 4953 while the new 3dmark06 scores 330 marks faster and gets to 2243 marks. The card scores 850 points in Shader mode 3.0 and HDR test.

Conclusion
It is a lot of card for 126 Euros, $134 or just about £100 in the UK. These are the cheapest price we could find in etail stores. For really decent money you will be able to get decent frame rates. Well it is not state of the art performance buy you can not expect more either. When overclocked card runs even better and gets ten to fifteen percent faster than the default clocked one.

I can recommend this card to anyone that wants to spend less than €150 for the graphic card as it should run faster than Nvidia 6600 GT AGP and will cost about the same.

We would like to see something even faster from ATI but we learned that at this time there are no any plans for AGP version of R520 cards so maybe we need to wait for RV560 / RV570 to see the new AGP card. Till that time this card will have to do but you always have Nvidia solution as an alternative. ?

Reviewed and tested by Sanjin Rados and Fuad Abazovic