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The Verdict
The price of the X1600 Pro has recently fallen a little and now is hovering at roughly 100 USD/EUR per card. And that's just a great price for one card ! But not if you want to buy two ... Let me explain. Installing a single card for 100 bucks will get you a tremendous amount of features for the money. Also the ICeQ cooler, bundle and the fact that you are able to play a game "reasonably" if you stick at a 10x7 resolution. The product however is not interesting enough for me as a Crossfire solution. Sure .. it looks fantastic and it has a great "ooh and aah" factor if you look at it. But the fact remains that two X1600 Pro cards do not equal double performance and why ? Because of the framebuffer limitation of 128 MB.
128MB RAM is simply not enough to give the product enough "breathing" space to do it's work in. The framebuffer is constantly swapping back and forth as it can't hold enough data, it is the major bottleneck here. That bottleneck results into a very negative effect on things like AA and AF. You pretty much need to steer clear of these image quality settings in the newer gaming titles and for 200 USD/EUR I find that a little hard to swallow.
So the dilemma is the 128MB memory. Don't think that 2x 128Mb is 256MB available memory. Crossfire does not work that way. You cant add up the number as that memory is cloned. It's a 128MB per card solution, for example one texture map is distributed to the framebuffer of both the cards. Then there's this fact, two of these cards set you back 200-220 USD. And that's exactly the price of a Radeon X1800 GTO with 256MB memory. As you have seen throughout our benchmark session, that card constantly is winning from the Crossfire solution. So that's where my recommendation needs to go, stick to a ~200 USD/EUR single card solution as it offers more performance.
If your sole reason for Crossfire X1600 Pro 128MB is to show off your system purely for the good looks ? Hey .. then buy it. Did you already buy one X1600 Pro 128 MB and you don't have the money to upgrade ? Then going Crossfire is also recommended as it offers you a nice performance boost for very little money. In any other scenario I'd give a negative recommendation though as the 200 USD single card solutions will offer better performance. Obviously you need to go with 256Mb per card to make this a more interesting purchase.
I need to state that the Crossfire solution as ATI is presenting it right now is quite charming. We had no real issues at all. You pop in the two cards into your Crossfire Ready (this really is preferred) Xpress1600 or Xpress3200 mainboard, install the drivers and simply enable Crossfire. It's that simple and it works really well.
When we step away from Crossfire and look at the single X1600 Pro 128MB for a second, then my two thumbs go up again. One card is simply dirt cheap, and sure it's not a game performance wonder but it does offer some good fun for the money. Next to that this model comes pre-clocked at X1600 XT speeds and it comes with that excellent ICEQ cooler which makes the card virtually run noiseless. This card would make an excellent HTPC card. It's small, silent and hey the most recent analysis I did with Catalyst drivers (6.4) the HQV video benchmark (DVD), the Radeon X1000 family cards managed to score an amazing 128 out of 130 possible points.
So in retrospect, HIS IceQ RADEON X1600 PRO Turbo 128MB PCI-E really is a very good product for its price, hey you are even getting a luxury bundle with a full game included. But the lacking memory of just 128 MB is hurting performance badly, even with the pre-clocked frequencies to the X1600 XT level. It results in hefty performance drops in modern games and higher resolutions. My recommendation therefore I find difficult to explain. On one side, the card is really first-class, it is well built, equipped with an admirable cooling system, its quality is fantastic as all HIS products are. On the other hand, I have some fears: you are forced to play your games at lower resolutions due to performance issues.
Crossfire however is working excellent and offers a fun boost in this scenario, but for twice that price, there are single card solutions out there offering way better performance, can I please point you to this review ? As a single card comes more recommended for that kind money.
Many thanks to HiS for supplying the cards.
