ATI Launches Midrange Radeon X1650 XT


It’s always fun to look at, dream about, lust after the high-end stuff, but when it comes down to it, most of us go right for the midrange option on whatever we’re buying. That’s what makes the new CrossFire-ready 256MB X1650 XT so appealing. It’s reasonably priced at $149 and has a good helping of the features you’ll find on the more expensive cards from the company. And it uses the improved version of ATI’s CrossFire multi-GPU technology. However, the X1650 XT uses GDDR3 instead of the newer GDDR4 memory and has half the pixel shader processors of the X1950 PRO. There’s also no support for DirectX 10 yet, though at this price point, I’m not really sure it would make or break my decision to pick one up. Plus, if you haven’t updated your desktop to PCI Express yet, there’s an AGP version.

EDIT: ExtremeTech and AnandTech have reviews up of the new card and, well, the X1650 XT disappointed both sites coming in a close second against its main competition, Nvidia’s 7600 GT.
ATI Radeon X1650 XT [product page]