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Sapphire churns out HDMI card bargain
We got hold of Sapphire's Hybrid Radeon X1600 Pro with 256MB GDDR3, HDMI, TV-out, low profile, PCIe card in its retail pack. The box simply says its X1600 PRO HDMI card and this is all you need to know about it. In the German/Austrian etail market this card costs a very affordable €130 and it is a lot of card for not so much money.
The low-profile card comes with a few brackets. If you use a desktop case the normal one will fit but if you have the small-profile machine you have to change to small-profile bracket as well. This is handy.
Sapphire includes HDMI cable, a DVI to HDMI dongle and an internal DVD ROM to sound two-pin cable. You need to connect your audio source if you want to get the audio from the other part of the HDMI cable.
The retail box includes an installation manual, driver CD, Power DVD 6 and a Sapphire select DVD that includes four games that you can try and at the end when you make the final choice you can buy the code from Sapphire and enjoy it. They include some good games including Brother in Arms Road to Hill, Prince of Persia Warrior Within, Richard Burns Rally and Tony Hawk's Underground 2. You can try them all but you can only register one to be yours till the end of days.
The card itself has a very quiet Sapphire branded cooler, VGA out, SPDIF for audio in and HDMI. We would like to see the DVI, HDMI, SPDIF combination, but this one works just fine.
The card uses RV530 core marketed as X1600PRO with four pipelines and twelve Shader support. The core works at 500MHz while the memory works at 800MHz. Unfortunately the card only uses 64-bit memory interface. The card uses Silicon Image SiI 1930 chip located next to the HDMI port. The chip supports DVI 1.0, HDMI 1.1 and works just fine.
We managed to play some of the games with the card.
Benchmarketing
We used:
Shuttle XPC SD11G5
Pentium M 760 2.00 GHz Dothan
Custom FD11V10 motherboard
Corsair PC4300 CM2X512 DDR 2 533
Seagate NCQ Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB S-ATA
NEC 3500AB DVD recorder
SB Live 5.1 integrated audio
BenQ FP93GX, 19" at 1280x1024
We didn't run the numbers we just plugged the card to se how the HDMI works. Well nothing much to say. You plug the cable into HDMI port of the TV and it works. It is as simple as that. The HDMI set will be recognized in catalyst and you might want to install Hydravision to make the navigation with two screens easier. The audio part works as well, but as a stereo only. You might want to drive video via HDMI and audio via separated SPDIF cable if you want to be able to use 5.1 sound. The alternative is a very expensive HDMI audio receiver and in this case you can drive the HDMI to audio receiver and then another HDMI patch cable to your HDMI TV set. You again return to the same number of cables.
We installed Prey and Brother of Arms to try the gaming on this machine. Well I was surprised that will most of the settings at highest lever without FSAA and Aniso you can play at decent 1280x1024 and this is exactly how most of the 19 inch display will be able to cope with. We didn't do any benchmarketing as this card is more for video and movie enthusiasts then it is for gamers but we can confirm that you will be able to play some games.
In Short
This is great card for anyone that wants to use HDMI connection. It will provide a nice video quality, crisp
picture on LCD and Plasma TV's and the best of all it will even let you play some games in your living room. At the
price around €130 I can recommend it to anyone who wants the HDMI connection. If you don't need the HDMI connection any
DVI card will do, but we like the bundle of this card as the DVI to HDMI dongle alone costs around €20 in the shops,
plus a game that costs at least 20 to €30 and finally the HDMI cable that costs €20+ in any Austrian retail stores.
And, trust me, you will need one of these cables sooner or later. ?
Reviewed and tested by Sanjin Rados and Fuad Abazovic
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