ATI Radeon 1950 XTX CrossFire Ed

ATI Radeon 1950 XTX CrossFire Edition uses ATI's R580+ graphics processor.

This high-end graphics card shows a marked improvement in terms of architecture

and performance compared to the X1950 PRO we reviewed last month. ATI has put

this card at par with the top performer from nVidia like GeForce 7900 GTX SLI

(the two are of similar price tag and belong to the same category). With Core 2

Duo processor on an MSI P965 Platinum motherboard and Intel 965 chipset, we got

very good performance and display, which will surely improve if you use a

combination of Core 2 Duo processor and a pair of X1950 XTX cards. It comes with

CrossFire dongle (an external cable) that can be connected to a CrossFire output

connector on its I/O panel (a set of two special ports) and allows connectivity

to another card as well as two dual-link DVI output ports. One might recall that

NVidia has done away with an internal bridge to connect two cards.

The 1950XTX adds a special composite engine for use of multi-GPU setup and

has GDDR4 memory at 1 GHz which delivers more memory bandwidth improving

performance even with max settings. The card scored 10,223 3DMarks in 3D Mark05

at 1024x768 resolution and 9,572 3DMarks at 1280x1024 resolution, indicating

that it is in a much higher league compared to the X1950 PRO (refer to Page 128,

January 2006, PCQuest). Coming to gaming tests, in FEAR at 1024x780 resolution

and with FSAA (Anti-Aliasing) set at 4x and Anisotropic Texture Filtering at

16x, it scored a maximum of 235 fps, which is very high in comparison to the

X1950 PRO. With Prey, it scored 65.6 fps with FSAA 4x and AF 16x, which is

interestingly lower than ATI's own X1950 PRO (76 fps at max settings). In Doom

3, the frame rate was 142.5 fps, quite higher than previous versions from ATI we

have reviewed. Though a good buy, it only supports DirectX 9c, restricting you

from migrating to Vista and using DirectX 10.

Bottom Line: If one can excuse the excessive power it consumes (nearly

600 W), it surely is a good bet for pro-gamers.

Saurangshu Kanunjna