Board analysis

Another shot of the X1650 XT

Top of the Radeon X1650 XT card

ATI’s Radeon X1650 XT reference board bears a striking resemblance to the board design of its predecessor, the Radeon X1600 XT. Both cards use the same printed circuit board (PCB) and cooling, although if you look closer you’ll see that ATI has tweaked the power circuitry a little on the Radeon X1650 XT board.

Because both boards are so similar though, this should make the transition to the Radeon X1650 XT easier for ATI and their board partners who will be manufacturing X1650 XT cards.

Cooling

As we just mentioned, ATI uses the same cooler that was first used on the Radeon X1300 Pro and Radeon X1600 XT reference boards for the Radeon X1650 XT. It’s a single-slot unit, with a ducted fan design and copper heatsink.

Radeon X1650 XT looks very similar to the X1600 XT reference board

Ducted cooling unit

Copper cooling

While the cooler has a small fan providing cooling, don’t let its small size fool you: it can push a lot of air and generate a lot of noise in the process – it’s that high-pitched fan noise that can be so annoying too. Fortunately since introducing the Radeon X1600 XT and X1300 Pro roughly a year ago, ATI has worked on the fan’s noise output so it runs quieter; with the Radeon X1650 XT the fan runs very quietly, in fact you’d be hard-pressed to hear it when running inside a case. The fan spins up to its max speed when you initially boot up the system, but after a few seconds it spins down to much lower levels,

Thanks to these changes, the fan runs circles around NVIDIA’s GeForce 7600 GT in the noise department, the noise issues with ATI’s GPUs appear to finally be gone. The cooler does a fairly decent job of keeping the graphics core cool too, we noted an idle GPU temperature of 47 degrees Celsius while load temps peaked to 68 degrees Celsius. Not bad for a single-slot cooler this small.

The memory modules

Two X1650 XT cards for CrossFire

2 12-bit CrossFire connections

Connectivity

In terms of connectivity, ATI equips their Radeon X1650 XT cards with two dual-link DVI connections. Video buffs will be glad to hear that Built By ATI Radeon X1650 XT cards will also support HDCP. VIVO support isn’t offered though.

Dual DVIs and single-slot cooling

Another CrossFire shot

Keep in mind that this applies solely to ATI’s own Radeon X1650 XT graphics cards. ATI’s board partners may or may not support HDCP with their own X1650 XT cards, as this is still officially considered an optional feature. ATI’s standard configuration will also come with 256MB of memory and solely support PCI Express, but there’s nothing stopping an enterprising board manufacturer from adding an AGP Radeon X1650 XT card to their lineup, and/or including more memory.