Benchmarks:

Conclusion:

    The Sapphire Ultimate X1650PRO is a very stable and solid card to say the least. Although it didn't play F.E.A.R. smoothly at the game's maximum settings, it did play it fine at lower settings. The other games played fairly well, and I feel that this card would work out better in a HTPC setup rather than a gaming rig.  The passive cooling of the heatsink worked better than I thought it would, with idle temps around 32.4C, and a load temp 48.8C during the benchmark and gaming processes. I was able to touch the fins of the heatsink and not have to pull away from it being too hot.

    The passive heatsink does require the space of two PCI expansion slots, and since the heatsink sits on top of the card (when installed in the case,) there is a possibility that the GPU cooler may make contact with the CPU cooler. This happened to me with my setup, although they just touched and no stress was put on either cooler, I feel that it's worth mentioning. One thing missing is heatsinks on the RAM: you may not be overclocking the card, but it's still good to have heatsinks on them anyway.

    The Sapphire Ultimate X1650PRO combines the best of both worlds into one package by making an excellent addition to a silent HTPC or for the budget to mid-level gamer. I would like to once again thank Sapphire for sending out this graphics card for VH to review.