Sapphire ships Radeon X1600PRO AGP
 

BACK IN December 2005 we reported that late January should be the time when both Nvidia and ATI will work hard to get their new AGP offerings out. We were not wrong. Nvidia released its 6800 GS AGP while ATI has been shipping its X1300PRO for a week or two now. Sapphire is raising the bars and starting to ship X1600PRO AGP at an incredibly low price.
The best of all is that the card is available now, at least in Germany and Austria. Sapphire clocked its Radeon X1600 PRO to 500MHz core with 800MHz memory. The card is equipped with 256MB of 128-bit memory, has four pixel pipes and twelve Shaders. This card is branded as Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X1600 Pro, 256MB DDR2, DVI, TV-out, AGP (snappy, huh?) and is available here . In Germany you can get one for very attractive €124.23 or €134.04 in Austria.

Sapphire is working on a 512MB version of the card but this one is not available jet. It is listed at €155 in Germany, nevertheless.

The Rialto bridge chip makes this AGP card possible, as the card still uses the RV530 chip just bridged down to AGP. It also supports Avivo, which means a nice HDTV playback for AGP systems as well and full support for Shader model 3.0 features.

A retail version will ship with Power DVD and a Sapphire Select DBD that will bundle a few top games for end users and you will be able to activate and play at least one of them. You can try the other games in demo mode. Select is a great stuff as it gives you an option over what game to activate with your card.

It is interesting that even it though this is an AGP card it will let you use resolutions as high as 2560x1600 via dual-link DVI. This means that even in an AGP version, the Radeon X1600 Pro AGP is a very functional and, indeed, fairly inexpensive baby.