The packaging of the Colorful X1650GT-GD3 seems basic. There are no game bundles, just the necessary cables, manuals for the user. That is probably how they manage to keep the price low at around 72 USD per piece.

Overclocking wise, the card seems to be quite overclockable, from the default 450/600 to 575/620. There is almost a 125Mhz increase in the GPU Core. Unfortunately, the GDDR3 though rated 1.4ns, gave way at beyond the 620MHz mark. By pushing it to 575MHz for the GPU core, we have in fact reached the performance levels of the X1650XT short of the lower memory speed.

In our test, the card  ran smoothly with no major issues encountered. One advantage of ATI X1k series of card is its support of the AVIVO Video Converter Engine which offloads your CPU and speeds up compression of videos into other formats. This is one of the plus points of a X1K.

Image quality with AVIVO under both WINXP and WIN VISTA is excellent with Catalyst 7.3. The same cannot be said for the NVIDIA 7600GT as the VISTA driver 101.02 seemed not ready for purevideo support.

In conclusion, the card exhibits a good price/performance ratio for the users. It can support what the X1650XT promises but at a lower clock speed.

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