Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05, and overclocking
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory brings the HIS X1650 XT iSilence II back up to parity with the XFX GeForce 7600 GT Fatal1ty Edition at 1280x1024, although it drops a little off the pace at 1600x1200.
The Sapphire X1650 Pro doesn't produce a fluid framerate at either resolution.
Putting on the hurt by dialing up the image quality via HDR, we see that these sub-£90 cards all suffer.
The Sapphire continues to remain around 50 per cent behind the HIS, thanks to the latter using an X1650 XT GPU rather than the crippled X1650 Pro.
The XFX continues to lead the pack, with the gain being attributable to a reasonable GPU that's heavily overclocked.
Overclocking
We've re-run the same Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory HDR test but highlighted performance with each card overclocked to its maximum stable limit.
The standout improvements belong to the HIS X1650 XT iSilence II and XFX GeForce 7600 GT Fatal1ty Edition, which raise default speeds of 575/1350 and 650/1600 to 628/1593 and 745/1770, respectively. Both add around 13 per cent to default performance.
If you're interested in a comparison, a reference Radeon X1950 Pro 256MiB card, priced at around £105, benchmarks at around 47FPS, and a GeForce 8800 GTS (£175) at around 69FPS in this test.
