Originally Posted by perkam
The X1600PRO is now a very reasonable value mainstream card. Patience is a virtue when going for a new mainstream card. The better X1600XTs have not even begun to arrive, and you jumped for an early x1600pro ? I'll give you that its late, but the X1600 has many multimedia features to compensate.
Always read the reviews before buying something. I'm not expecting the card to start killing 6800GTs in games, because I've seen the benchmarks. Not only does its AVIVO capabilities trounce high end CPUs in encoding and decoding video formats, it hasmany other features which have yet to be unlocked through future drivers. Not to mention better drivers in the future will offer significant performance increases.
The X1600PRO is a good card for casual gaming at a low price but not full throttle mainstream gaming. That's why it has DDR2 to cut costs. The DDR3 on the X1600XT alone costs ~$90 for 256MB and will cost even more for the 512MB GDDR3 versions.
I wouldn't bash the X800XL, it will pwn both a 6800GS and a 6800GT, not to mention most GTOs out there with ease and is now available for under $200 with the new Powercolor GTO16. Making an uninformed decision has its consequences - an X1600PRO at $200 is a $70 Euro rip off the second you bought it. It will still be great for multimedia use. Might I suggest you wait until January for the X1700...which will be the true Next generation mainstream card, going against the Nvidia 7600.
Perkam