PowerColor X1950 Pro review

ATI's Radeon X1900 XT has been our recommended graphics card for a while.

With its reasonable price and excellent performance, it's capable of running games at high resolutions. ATI plans to go one better with its Radeon X1950 Pro, designed to offer similar performance for a lot less money.

We have one of the first cards to use this graphics chip, PowerColor's X1950 Pro. We reviewed the 256MB version, but there's also a 512MB version of the card, which costs £183 including VAT. Rather than use the standard reference design, PowerColor decided to use an Artic Cooling heatsink and fan, which run almost silently. It's not suitable for all cases; the heatsink bulges over the side of the card, so you'll have trouble installing it in a mini case. The card also takes up two slots, so you need to take this into account before you buy.

Rather than using the newer GDDR4 memory ATI has started using on its high-end X1950 XTX graphics cards, the X1950 Pro uses standard GDDR3 memory. Its specifications are still good, though, with a core speed of 600MHz, 36 pixel pipelines and its memory clocked at 700MHz (1.4GHz). This card's specifications are a little behind the X1900 XT, but gaming performance is what really counts.

As you can see from our results, the X1950 Pro did exceptionally well in all our tests and the Call of Duty 2 results are particularly impressive. To see how it coped with higher resolutions, we upped our Call of Duty 2 test to 1,600x1,200 and ran it again. The score of 29.6fps shows this card can cope with modern games at higher detail settings. Furthermore, the card scored slightly higher than PowerColor's X1900 XT. The Doom 3 performance is good, but lags behind the scores achieved by Nvidia-based graphics cards; this game uses OpenGL, and ATI's drivers aren't as good as Nvidia's with this technology.

The X1950 Pro is CrossFire-capable, but it uses the new internal connector that uses two adaptors to join the card to another in a similar way to SLI. This is neater, because you don't have the mess of cables hanging out the back of your case. It's also easier to upgrade, as you don't need a CrossFire master card; as with SLI, any two matching ATI cards with an internal CrossFire connector will do. One thing PowerColor's X1950 Pro doesn't have is support for DirectX 10. This is unlikely to be a problem for the next year, though, as all new games have support for DirectX 9.

At least as quick as the Radeon X1900 XT but a lot cheaper, PowerColor's X1950 Pro is the best graphics card you can buy if you want fast graphics on a reasonable budget.

Author: David Ludlow