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The Verdict

Okay yeah so well now hmm ugh... I honestly did not expect this kind of performance ! And as long as the price is right, this card can outsell a lot of other cards and it will. For roughly 239 USD/EUR this 512MB model can be bought. Seriously this is not bad man !

We took a look at the 512MB model and that definitely has an advantage over the 256MB models but still, the X1950 Pro manages to position itself above the GeForce 7900 GS and even is darn close and sometimes faster than the GeForce 7950 GT. The difference can be explained by the 36 Pixel shader cores on the Radeon card, obviously the more shader intensive games will benefit from it greatly which most games these days are. So that is very impressive performance. 

Unfortunately the beta Catalyst 6.8 driver that came with this card did not allow us to verify temperatures of the card and also, we could not overclock to see what the additional potential here is. I hope to bring you some results once the drivers are final.

Playing games at 1600x1200 with high IQ settings enabled is simply not at all an issue, everything plays silky smooth in terms of way above average framerates. You just do not need to compromise on image quality which is great. Do look a little outside the box though and realize the card is more than just am item to play games with. It's also a media encoder and accelerator as well. This means your CPU does not have to decode a HD movie, nope your graphics card will do that for you and with the new AVIVO functionality you can bet it's at very high quality. The card is H.264 at 1080P ready. Fantastic stuff if you decide to hook up the card to a HD screen for example, that's magic on your screen man. Stability then... okay this might be a refresh product, but not once did we experience a hiccup in the form of a crash or even freeze, impressive. The Radeon series come with a rock-solid driver package, they are well developed (although BIG) and working fine.

The inclusion of the AC Accelero fan is something I personally can learn to love. I just don't like the collosal looks of that thing, it's like an elephant sitting on top of a mouse isn't it ? None-the-less despite me being unable to monitor temps I'm absolutely certain it is performing great. The other thing about the cooler that has to be mentioned is that it is hardly making any noise, which in today's systems is a must for sure.

Also, the new 80nm fabrication process shows off some good result with the X1950 Pro, power consumption is at an all-time low (for a graphics card) and that's why I'm also convinced that GPU temperatures are good, as likely the internal voltage of the core is lower than previous generation products. Obviously there will be many reviews covering Crossfire with this card, we didn't but I have to applaud ATI for finally making a "SLI" like bridge connector which can be found at the top of the card. That's a big thumb up from me for that.

So yeah, there you have it. I was pleasantly stunned by the performance of this card considering it's pricing level. It obviously has all the Series X1000 features one can mention yet offers a fantastic gaming experience for not a lot of money. I can recommend the X1950 Pro 512MB card greatly.

Thanks go out to PowerColor for supplying this early sample of the card. And on a second note, we just receive two reference samples of this product from ATI for some Crossfire lovin'.. more on that soon !

Series: Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB
More info: PowerColor
MSRP: 229 USD
Seek best price on Guru3D.com pricewatch, click here.