HIS X1950 XTX review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 23 Oct 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: David Ludlow

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The Radeon X1950 XTX is ATI's new high-end graphics chip, and HIS is the first manufacturer to send us a sample.

Rather than offering a simple clock speed and memory increase over the existing X1900 range, the card is the first we've seen that uses GDDR4 memory. The new memory type consumes less power than GDDR3 and can reach higher clock speeds.

HIS's X1950 XTX has 512MB of memory running at 1GHz (2GHz effective), the fastest we've seen on a graphics card. It also has 48 pixel pipelines and a 650MHz core. It certainly looks impressive, but it's performance that counts, so we put the card through our usual tests. As you can see from the scores below, it stormed through the tests at our regular settings and a resolution of 1,280x1,024. Most impressive was the Doom 3 score - ATI's raw power is finally making up for its OpenGL drivers, which are not as good as Nvidia's.

We pushed the resolution up to 1,600x1,200 and were equally impressed. Call of Duty 2 dropped only 1.7fps to 44.5fps, while Doom 3 still managed an impressive 72.7fps. It will cope easily with the latest games, now and well into the future. If you want even more power, you can use the card in CrossFire mode with an X1950 master card. This graphics card is as bulky as the previous X1900 range and takes up two slots in a case, but it's not quite as loud and has a quieter fan at the rear.

HIS's X1950 XTX is the card to buy if you want a fast single card; it doesn't suffer from the same performance variations as Asus's 7950GX2 (right). If your monitor has a maximum resolution of only 1,280x1,024 or lower, though, PowerColor's X1900 XT is better suited to your needs.

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