SLI and Crossfire powered gaming systems are something most of us can only dream about. The same thing is true for cards like the dual-GPU GeForce 7950GX2. The majority of us have to look at single-card solutions, and even then the pricier models can be rather expensive. For that reason both ATI and nVidia offer several cards that can still be considered high-end, but with their price being set at a far more reasonable level. Today we look at offerings from both ATI and nVidia, namely the Radeon X1900GT HDCP by Connect3D and the GeForce 7900GS by Foxconn. To spice things up we will compare the results from both cards with a representative of the last generation of nVidias 7x00 series – the 7800GT. The card is getting rather difficult to buy, since it is no longer being manufactured, but its price is similar to that of both the other cards. Cards in this price range are likely to be partnered with a midrange TFT screen running at around 1280x1024, so we will be running tests at this resolution with as much eye candy enabled as possible.

The X1900GT HDCP

The X1900GT we tested belongs to the new revision of the X1900GT line. As such, it sports a brand new cooler (seen in the picture below). The new cooler is not the only difference though. The GPU speeds have been reduced to 513 Mhz from 575 Mhz. On the other hand, the memory timings are a lot higher - 657 Mhz instead of the old 600 Mhz. Unfortunately owners of the new revision don’t get the ability to overclock the card. Yes, as you can see in the above screenshot the overdrive feature is missing. The card can fortunately still be overclocked with the help of 3rd party tools.

One thing that didn’t change with the new revision is the size – the card is still a behemoth and will possibly cause some installation issues in smaller, more cramped cases.

The board features the (nowadays) standard outputs – Two dual DVI connectors and a TV-out connector. Similar to other ATI offering the card is AVIVO enabled which gives it the ability to accelerate HD video rendering. An important feature of the card is also that it is HDCP enabled, which makes it 100% future-proof when talking about video outputs.

The first impression one gets by looking at the box is that it is extremely small. Once opened we have a large array of cables and converters inside the box (see the picture below). The card itself resides under. Software-wise the package doesn’t offer much, the box contains only one CD on which the drivers can be found, as well as the full version of the video editing software 3DEdit Silver.