PowerColor Radeon X1900 GT 256MB - Page 16

The Verdict

The X1900 GT is a really fun product to own and for the money it's offering really good performance. It's a weird product though as for some reason it does not feel well balanced from a certain perspective. So in your more regular games where there's not a lot of pixel shading going on the card will perform good, yet in the higher segment of mid-range. Once a game starts utilizing pixel shaders .. that's where the 36 pixel processors kick in and boost performance. So that's just a bit hard to describe.

None the less the quality and performance of the product is awesome and suffice to say is that you'll receive very decent features and options for this kind of money.  Like most of the cards we test these days we had no stability issues whatsoever, the one thing that alarms me a little is the core temperature of the graphics processor when it is at 100% load .. it was pushing an 85 Degrees C temperature which is just too high in my humble opinion. This might be something isolated to this test sample though.

The million dollar question then. 7900 GT or X1900 GT ? We'll I'd choose the 7900 GT as in most cases the X1900 GT was performing a tad slower. Looking at the other side, HDR+AA implementation on the X1900 GT is far better than NVIDIA's then there's always the topic of image quality which just seems to be a notch better on ATI products.

The next million dollar question .. would I buy a X1900 GT over a X1800 XT ? Short answer no .. it's a win-win situation though yet the 512MB memory on the XT and the 4 extra pipes make this the better product in the long run, obviously it is slightly more expensive also but the two are close for sure. The X1800 XT however uses a dual-slot and most of all rather noisy cooler. So at the end of the tunnel it boils down to very simple questions. Do you want a dual-slot cooler, do you opt for a less audible product. On the other side Pixel shading is becoming more important with newer titles, until we hit DX10 that is. These are more practical than pragmatic choices ...

It is suffice to say that Powercolor has an an excellent lower high-range performer in the market that offers seriously good performance for your bucks. Pretty much all games can be played at really good resolutions, you are no longer bound to a 1024x768 resolution in this mid-range segment of products. Some examples have to be F.e.a.r which at 1280x1024 was still pushing an average framerate of 47 FPS with 4xAA and 8xAF. And for that title that's exceptionally good performance. What about Splinter Cell 3 Chaos Theory ... 1920x1200 with 16 levels of anisotropic filtering enabled and HDR active pushed an average framerate of 37 FPS, again that's just really excellent. Evidently this is one Pixel shader bound games and that's where the money shot is with this product.

Please do bare in mind that it's not all about gaming anymore with today's graphics cards. With the X1900 GT comes the full Radeon X1000 family features. Among it AVIVO, and I just have to state that ever since ATi released the Catalyst 5.13 driver in late 2005 the output/decoding quality of graphics card decoded media files (and especially SD content) was taken to extremely nice quality. The HQV benchmark proofs it very well, that remains to be a subjective test though but yeah .. image quality is just exceptionally good. For what is matters, Image quality as always is extremely good with ATI product. They just do not compromise at it and next to that I just have to mention that even with the Beta driver we had to all games just where looking marvelous. In our conclusion we always say a thing or two about stability as ATI has come a long way with driver development. Their driver reputation is still haunting them and therefore I'm glad to report that we did not have one driver issue or a crash whatsoever.

Okay .. so I'm still not a fan of the memory hog that is called the Catalyst Control panel but I'll just have to life with it.

Personally I can really appreciate the X1900 GT as it offers a stack load of fun for the money you have to pay. Products like these you can pickup for roughly 299 USD and they guarantee you very decent gameplay and framerates at the best quality in resolution up-to 12x10 and even 19x12 in several situations if you enable eye-candy. Now that's not bad at all huh ?

The PowerColor Radeon X1900 GT is 100% reference based up-to the MHz precisely, it does offer really nice overclockability to squeeze even more performance out of it, yet it does get really hot under that hood. Whether you choose the X1800 XT or this product is a bit of a trade off. Now if this GT would be available in a 512MB edition .. now that would be really interesting. Look at the simply things like dual-slot cooling or even the best bargain you can find. Perhaps that'll make the choice easier for you.

Thanks to PowerColor for submitting this sample.