It is more than 3 months since ATI released their latest line of cards, the X1900 series, and since then it's been a joyride for them, with said cards heralded as top of the line by most publications in both the speed and image quality departments. The decoupling of the pixel pipeline allowed ATI to have 48 pixel shader processors, giving it the edge in many situations over rival nVIDIA, who decided to act conservatively with it's 90 nm refreshes as far as clock speeds are concerned, and giving most of its focus to its SLI technology, which is still heralded by many as a more mature product than ATI's Crossfire.

Perhaps the sole criticism one could find to the new series was the fact that the two models the X1900 line was comprised of at launch, the X1900 XT and the X1900 XTX, have only a small difference in clock speeds, with the XT running at 625 core / 725 mem, while the XTX running at 650 core / 775 mem. So the real question is: is paying premium for the XTX model justified? Are there any extras that come with that premium, such as higher overclockability? That's what we're about to find out in this article.

The card

The card we had in our disposal was kindly provided by Club3D, a company which is very popular here in Europe, since they provide solutions from all major players in the graphics card industry, including ATI and nVIDIA; Club3D is well known for sticking with the reference design for its cards, and for having great quality and (even greater) prices for their cards.

The card is what you will find in the retail shops, so so I believe it’s a representative sample of what you can achieve with it.

The bundle is not on the rich side – but most people do not pay attention to those anyway. Of course Club3D tried to give something extra to the perspective buyer, so you can find Colin McRae 2005 and WWF Panda Junior in Africa. To be honest we were surprised with the inclusion of the latter in a bundle of a super high-end graphics card, but our guess is that Club3D tries to cater to the tastes of its youngest customers as well.

You also get a multimedia CD which contains programs such as Cyberlink's PowerDVD 5, PowerDirector, PowerProducer and Medi@Show, and of course the obligatory Driver CD. You also get a leaflet explaining the basic steps while installing your new graphics card inside your PC, but you won't get a full-blown manual in printed form, just electronic; something which is a bit of a nuisance.