What we’re left with is a nice, compact card that performs very well in its market segment. Yeah it’s probably not going to be enough to get by with when you’re running around in Crysis in a couple weeks, but for the majority of today’s games it’s enough to get you playing, even with AA and AF enabled in some cases. Not bad for a $149 card.

Looking at the comparisons we’ve made in the benchmarks it’s pretty clear that you’d be better off with a single X1900 XT 256MB rather than two X1650 XT’s setup for Crossfire. The performance results show that the single X1900 XT beats out two X1650 XTs in many tests, and additional to that are the limitations a multi-GPU configuration automatically brings with it that tilts the scales in the single X1900 XT 256MBs favor. The fact that the X1900 XT 256 is $50 cheaper than two X1650 XTs ultimately makes the decision there a no-brainer.

Depending on how tight your budget is you might also want to consider the X1950 Pro too. It can’t touch two X1650’s in Crossfire, but an extra $50 seems to be really worth it to get the extra performance offered there, especially if you plan on hanging onto the card for a while. You also get the same internal Crossfire feature too, which can’t be overlooked.

Overall, however, I would have to say that the X1650 XT offers very good performance at the $149 price point.

It’s certainly a significant step-up from the X1650 Pro/X1600 XT, that’s for sure, which is no surprise considering the R580 heritage hiding under the cooler. In fact the performance improvement is almost two fold in a few cases. It’s unfortunate that I couldn’t get my hands on a 7600 GT from NVIDIA to provide a complete picture of this market segment, but given the performance and price I don’t think you can go wrong with an X1650 XT.