Zardon

Read the review here
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ATI's latest refresh is upon us, and we have an indepth analysis ready for your enjoyment, we know what hardcore gamers want at Driver Heaven!

We have tested ATI's latest with a good cross section of games ranging from current first person shooters such as PREY to Microsoft's upcoming Flight Simulator X and we also pit the board against current ATI and Nvidia hardware to see if its worth an upgrade. We also have information on mixed crossfire configurations, CPU scaling (with a vapochill cooled extreme edition conroe running at 4ghz), as well as game tests running at resolutions up to 2560x1600 on a 30 inch Dell screen. We look at how the card handles against competing boards with optimisations off/HQ enabled. We also overclock the card to see what headroom you can expect.

Erroneus

Woav, what a suprise to see a review so early, nice job DH!

Excellent card and the right move from ATI to make a new version of x1900xt with a proper cooler and a lower price, making it more competitive against 7950gx2.

This could actually be good choice between 7900gt and 7950gx2 if you look at the value.

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Lelisevis

Brilliant article as usual. Covered most genres of games unlike some sites who stick to FPS only.
For Mr average user like myself it's an increasingly difficult time to be in the market for a GPU upgrade. This graphics card appears to be nothing more than a testing ground for GDDR4 with a nicer cooler, surely the money invested in this revision would have been better spent on the next generation core which looks to be only months away.

One other question this has raised is just who do the game designers put the fully maxed option in for? Looking at the results that came from it even with the meatiest hardware it's be pretty much unplayable.

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DH Reviews: If you like them, Digg them. You know it makes sense.

Partizan

Great article again by the DriverHeaven reviewers. Both design and the contents are awesome! Respect.

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Veridian3

I wouldnt say this card is a "testing ground" for GDDR4. That memory type has been around for a while behind closed doors and Samsung have much higher spec chips (up to 3.2Ghz) running already. Certainly its the first graphics card for the masses however the chips themselves should be very stable.

On the max front, all of the options are enabled in the control panel of each driver rather than the games themselves. For end users like yourself you would really be best advised to drop the resolution then enable these settings... having a dual card setup makes 1280x1024 playable at maxed settings in most titles.

Vikingod

Very nice review guys, hats off.

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ViRuS2k

I dont know why i just bought this X1950XT-X now lol

Canseling my ORDER ASAP and buying a X1900XTX again.. 1-3frames
i dont know who feels more gutted, me for selling my X1900XTX for this X1950XTX or ATI for selling this pile of shite lol

either way no way im paying over £100 for just 3-4 frames bump lol

evrt63

great review! love the min, avg, and max fps numbers.

Zardon

Well thats a little harsh, the X1950XTX was never meant to be a new revoluntary product, its basically a faster, quieter X1900 card with GDDR4 memory and the stepping stone for a new range. We give it the top award for a variety of reasons detailed in the review, but consider this time last year the card would have been brought out at £400, not £300 which ATI are asking now.

ViRuS2k

yeah guess your right m8 but i was expecting more i guess..
guess ati released these cards as you said a steping stone towards the GDDR4 R600 DX10 Cards

i ended up buying the ICEQ3 X1900XT and will overclock it to X1900XT-X and then some more then i will practicly have a X1950XTX for £100 less that what the X1950 would cost me.

tornadog

excellent review, very detailed and well worded. That said, it kinda justifies my conviction its not the card to upgrade to. I think Dx10 cards are the way to go.....Bring on Vista!!!!

Judas

Nice card, i'm more interested in the Crossfire front though, hopefully ATI has completely solved the crashes/hangs/artifacts/jitters and all the previous issues in a wide range of games with the new one, and hopefully they'll provide a slider for setting/forcing AFR and then setting the type of forced tiling/scissors modes.

I'm impressed with the memory overclock though.

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Zardon

we will have a full crossfire review in the near future. we wanted to put that in a seperate article and also get final retail boards.

Judas

yeah a final retail product would be best imo.

I've been waiting for these cards OR for the next gen before i decide to RMA the current cards i've got that are littered with issues that i've been told by a ATI support rep that only way to fix it will be to RMA and they'll send the new revisions.

However i plan instead to just send in the 2 cards and pay the difference for the newer line if possible.

2560x1600 resolution is steller, but quite a few games suffer some performance issues (dropping below 30fps) with Crossfire, and i'm not reffering to newer games, i'm reffering to a few of the older games.

Serious Sam 2 is amazing though at that resolution with HDR

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dipstick

Nice review although some GX2 numbers seem a little low(probably due to all the driver bugs) The card is sweet for what it is meant to be and it comes at a good price. Just being quieter than the X1900 makes it a better buy