by Rob Williams on March 13, 2006 in Graphics & Displays
Are you building a new PC or HTPC and are looking for a great budget card? PowerColor may have exactly what you need, with their X1600XT 256MB. It offers great gaming performance for a budget card, and includes the AVIVO technology to make your video experience even better.
For as many people that love 3D Mark, there is an equal amount that dislike it. Even though you should never base your GPU purchase on a synthetic benchmark, it is still a fun demo to run to see how well your card performs compared to another.
For these tests, I ran the default benchmarks for each 3D Mark 03, 05 and 06. For 05 and 03, I disabled the extra CPU benchmarks. I re-ran all three once the card was overclocked to get a general idea of performance improvement.
Core/Mem
- Stock: 590 Core / 694 Mem
- Overclock: 665 Core / 774 Mem
In the older version of 3D Mark, the 6800GT has an obvious advantage. The stock score is almost 3,000 higher than the X1600XT. It’s interesting to look at the ’05 test though, because the X1600XT actually beat out the 6800GT. Why this is, I have no idea. The 6800GT regained the crown in ’06 though, but it’s not exactly a large difference.
Now that 3D Mark is out of the way, let’s head into our benchmark overview and Image Quality tests.