Hi I am putting together a new machine at the moment, and see as the new motherboard supports crossfire and I have an old radeon x1600 PRO, I thought I may as well set up crossfire with another cheap second hand card (I realise these card are nothing special, but I don't play games much). The ATI site tells me that I can match my card with either another x1600PRO, an x1600XT, or an x1650PRO. At first I thought I may as well go with the 1650PRO, but I would like to know if this is worth it; will its performance be dragged down waiting for the 1600, meaning I should only bother with another identical card? Thanks, Neal

If you don't play games much why would you need two cards at all? You could try the single card for a while to see if it's adequate. Your 6000+ cpu is certainly not a performance bottle neck. Going by the model numbers there is probably only a tiny difference between the performance of the two cards, if any, so you will probably be fine, assuming they are both PCI-E. You could compare the card chipset specs to see what the difference is, if any.

Well, I don't play games much, but I still like them to run nicely when I do play them, I just don't want the investment of £100+ on graphics hardware. I can upgrade to a second card for about £20-25 though, which I'd be more willing to part with. So I was just wondering, do ATI allow you to mix cards with slightly different specs for compatability's sake, or is there a slight benefit to having one card better than the other. It's more a curiosity thing really; there's not much difference in price between an x1600PRO and and x1650 pro on ebay, but the 1650 is a fair bit faster. If it makes a difference, I'll hold out for one, otherwise, I'll just buy whatever

If I were you I would try the single card for a while. If your mboard has 2 PCI-E X16 slots and that's what you'll be installing both cards in, the ATI/AMD main mboard chipset supports both cards at X16, and having both cards running at that speed will have have much more of a noticable effect and whatever slight difference there is between the speed of the two cards is a relatively minor factor. Contrast that with many of the Nvidia chipsets - most run two X16 cards at X8 each.

For the most part, Crossfire or SLi setups are a waste of money, especially when using low end cards. You'd be better off selling the X1600 & buying something better. And since you're running Vista, you may as well get a card that supports DX10. The HD 2600XT sells for about $60 US & while it's not a high end card, it still outperforms two X1600Pro's in Crossfire.

Well I agree with Tubesandwires' opinion.