Author: Scott Piercy

Editor: Nigel Woodford

Model: The Crucial Radeon X1600 XT 256MB PCI

ATI's Crossfire platform is one that has been slow to mature, relative to Nvidia's SLI platform. Thankfully though that's a situation that has changed significantly in the last 2 quarters, and one that should be fully mature by the the time ATI begins shipping it's R600 derived technology.
Today, we're going to examine the performance of a middle-of-the-road graphics solution ATI's X1600XT, specifically the Crucial Radeon X1600XT 256MB PCI Express. Crucial USA was gracious enough to provide us with two of these cards, and as such we're certainly not going to pass up the opportunity to evaluate a cable-less Crossfire scenario with these cards on the Intel P965 chipset.

Though the P965 is the more "value oriented" chipset in Intel's lineup relative to the P975, it has become an enthusiast favorite due to the drastically higher front side bus clocks you can obtain with it on many enthusiast boards. The PCI lane arrangement of the two chipsets is significantly different, with the 975 supporting twin slots with 8 PCI-E lane's directly within the MCH, while the P965 chipset support 16 PCI-E lanes on the MCH, and 4 PCI-E lanes on the ICH using the much lower bandwidth of the Direct Media Interface (DMI) for communications.

The disadvantages of this implementation are well documented by the reviews of our colleagues, and show roughly a 5-10% performance disadvantage on the P965 chipset due to the bandwidth restrictions of relying on the DMI interface. At least in the case of higher end cards with higher bandwidth requirements that is. In our case, using X1600XT's, this shouldn't be an issue. With the significantly higher FSB's attainable on many P965 boards, this little performance difference will largely end up being inconsequential anyway. Unfortunately, we only have one Crossfire capable P965 board in our lab, the ECS PX1, and though it's a stable serviceable and feature rich board, it's NOT an example of stellar P965 overclocking.

Before we move on to taking a look at the cards themselves, let's take a look at the obligatory specifications page.