PowerColor X1950 PRO Extreme 256mb

»Bigger is better« holds true practically everywhere except in electronics. A smaller manufacturing process benefits both the manufacturer as well as the consumer. The first enjoys lower costs of production while we see this improvement in the form of reduced power usage and lower work temperatures. Behold the ATI X1950 PRO, a rejuvenated version of the crowd favorite X1900GT. With higher clocks, a similar price and native internal crossfire support the card may become even more popular than the X1900GT was.

Internal Crossfire has been long overdue, the way it works is very similar to how nVidia’s SLI operates – you no longer need a Crossfire edition master card and a normal (slave) card for Crossfire as all the new cards have the Crossfire controller and it is up to the driver to decide which card will act as the master. With the X1950 Pro you just use two cards (with the same chipset) and connect them with a double (flexible) internal bridge. Native Crossfire is obviously better than the original implementation as it doesn’t require a master card and the lack of an external connector makes the whole setup more elegant.

The PowerColor card we tested adheres to the reference ATI X1950 Pro. This means the clocks are set at 600Mhz for the GPU and 700Mhz for the memory chips. Manufacturers were given free reign over how the card would be cooled however PowerColor decided to go with a proven method of cooling – the Arctic Cooling Accelero X2. The cooler is amongst the quietest fan powered coolers out there and the temperatures it maintains are really excellent. There is no doubt that the decision to use the Accelero coolers is a commendable one.

The outputs the card bears are no different than the ones found on almost any other X1xx00 card out there. The two dual DVI connectors make company to the now standard TV-Output capable of HD output. The card is of course AVIVO enabled.

The packaging is nothing special to look at and the contents are the same. The manual, molex-to-PCI power converter, the two TV-out cables and the DVI to VGA converter are complemented with two CDs, one containing all the necessary ATI software and the other one Cyberlink’s DVD bundle. It should be noted that the internal bridge needed to connect two cards in a Crossfire setup is not provided in the package. All in all it is a functional yet bland package.