PowerColor Radeon X1650 XT video card review

If there's one topic I feel like I've written rather frequently about in recent years for Elite Bastards, it's been NVIDIA's relative dominance of the mid-range graphics board market.  I'm not the only one either - Ask the average graphics enthusiast to name the best middle-of-the-road parts from the past couple of generations, and I would almost guarantee that the GeForce 6600 GT and 7600 GT would top the list.  Try as they might, ATI simply hasn't managed to grab much of a foothold in this market.

Of course, that hasn't stopped them from making frequent attempts to at least restore parity to this important segment of the industry, and even with DirectX 10 just around the corner ATI and/or AMD (delete according to your preference in these things) are still pushing hard to capture the attention of the mid-range buyer.  It is their latest assault on the GeForce 7600 GT's dominance that we shall be looking at today, by way of PowerColor's 'RV560' (I'll explain the need for the inverted commas shortly) Radeon X1650 XT board.  Has NVIDIA's G73 core finally met its match?  Read on to find out.