If you can even remember that far back, Diamond Multimedia should be ringing a few bells in your memory as the providers of the well-known Diamond "Monster" series of graphics accelerators featuring the 3dfx Voodoo chipsets. It seems that after the Voodoo days, they just dropped off the map.  Now, years later, they're back in full force (or maybe just out of hiding) with a new set of cards based off of the X1000 Radeon chipsets.  Oddly enough, they're part of the Viper series now, and it appears that Diamond has gone with ATi chips exclusively. Maybe it's because they like red, but I digress.

Today, we'll be looking at their CrossFire Edition X1600 Pro with 256MB of DDR2 memory.  What?  Only 256 MB?  Don't we deserve a 512 MB card?  Well sure, but remember!  Look for the higher model number first and THEN look at the amount of memory. For example: X1600 Pro with 512MB of memory versus an X1800XT with 256MB of memory. The X1800 is superior by far . One could...also kind of look at the price too at this point, but... the point is that one should not ever look at the amount of memory as a measure of performance. To put it simply, not all memory is the same. The memory in high-end cards is...high-end, and you can bet that most of the overwhelming price that one pays for those is in the memory because they're difficult to make in large quantities. On the other hand, there are buckets and buckets of low-end memory...for low end cards.

I had to get that off my chest.  Seems that I've been getting a lot of questions about that, so now you all know, and knowing is half the battle.  Now on with the Diamond Viper X1600 256MB Review!

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