Verdict: A year on and the X1600-series is still best avoided.

The X1600-series was ATi's attempt to create a selection of mid-range graphics cards to compete with the GeForce 7600 GT. The X1600-series cards owe their lineage to the high-end X1800-series, which marked the debut of the X1000-series architecture.

As such, both members of the X1600-series, the X1600 Pro and X1600XT, have the same GPU, but run at very different clock frequencies. The GPU itself has three of what ATi calls 'quad pixel-shader cores', which translates into a healthy 12 pixel processors. However, with only five vertex pipes, four ROPs and four texture processors, the X1600-series GPUs are less capable when it comes to rendering textured pixels. The memory controller is a cut-down version of the ring bus controller found on X1800-series cards, but it's only half the width (128-bit as opposed to 256-bit). The X1600 Pro is clocked at 500MHz and accompanied by 256MB of RAM running at 390MHz (780MHz effective), while the X1600XT runs at 590MHz and has 256MB of RAM clocked at 690MHz (1.38GHz effective).

The X1600 Pro couldn't provide a smooth frame rate in any of our three games at 1,024 x 768. In contrast, the much higher-clocked X1600XT was just about able to play F.E.A.R. smoothly at 1,024 x 768, but was hopelessly slow in Need for Speed: Carbon and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The X1600 Pro is reasonably overclockable, however, as we were able to increase the GPU speed to 590MHz and the RAM to 430MHz (860MHz effective). This wasn't enough of an overclock to improve the card's performance significantly though - our sample X1600XT wouldn't overclock at all.

Despite being more than a year old, X1600 Pro and X1600XT cards are still on sale, but we wouldn't recommend buying one. Although both cards are very cheap, their old nemesis, the GeForce 7600 GT, is still available and is a far better buy, as it's almost twice as fast in shader-intensive DirectX 9 games.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
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• OCZ Core Series 30GB - Hard disks / storage
• Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB - Hard disks / storage
• Asus EAH4870 TOP - Graphics cards
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro - Sound cards
• Multiwinia - Games
• Zotac GeForce GTX 260² - Graphics cards
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