MSI RX1600XT-T2D256E
Moving on to MSI, who also has two products in our round-up, the first of which is a fairly standard card with a slightly different single slot cooler compared to the reference model. Like every other Radeon X1600 GT in this round-up, the MSI card features 256MiB of high-speed GDDR3 memory.
It's back to slimline cooling for the RX1600XT, but the way in which air is routed across the heatsink differs from the norm, going back and up. The design of the cooler suggests to us that it's supposed to conduct heat away from both the GPU and memory chips. However, despite there being thermal interface material on the memory chips, the heatsink wasn't making contact with them. We've already seen that the memory chips don't need to be cooled, but it seems this heatsink was intended to, giving us a little cause for concern.
Nevertheless, the heatsink and fan combination proved to be nice and quiet when in use.
Around the back MSI has decided to use a bracket to help hold the heatsink in place and distribute the forces acting on the card, much like with the reference cooler.
See a trend forming in the output ports on these cards? MSI offers a couple of dual-link DVI outputs for large-screen fun.
The card has two bits of documentation, one a user's guide, the other a quick installation guide, so if you're not savvy to how all this works, you can read one to quickly get the thing installed then worry about how it works.
Software-wise we have another occurrence of archaic drivers (5.11), but there is Colin McRae Rally 2005 and a special Cyberlink bundle of DVD software called the "Star DVD Family", featuring StarCinema and Star2Go.
Much to our amusement, one of the CDs in the bundle features the slogan "Beyond3D". A nod to Wavey Dave perhaps? Surely not! Perhaps it's referring to someone else now.
Once more, we've got no VIVO on this card, so it's component cabling in the bundle, along with S-Video/composite. MSI has also provided a sticker, for those who like to plaster the front of their case in badges. There is, of course, a DVI-DSUB adapter.
