AMD-based high-end VGA cards: Part I
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 10 Dec 2006

In huge anticipation of this new-and-ultra-cool-thing called R600, we decided to do a short cross-section of current AMD/ATi high-end VGA cards. We had a huge pile of NVIDIA-related reviews in the past couple of weeks which is kind of natural because of the 8800-series launch. So, as a part one - here comes the X1950XTX review.

Powercolor X1950XTX and ASUS X1950XTX

When you take a look inside the huge box that has this really beautifully designed card inside, you'll find a decent number of extras - manual, driver CD, two DVI-VGA adapters, S-Video and Composite cable, as well as HDTV/ViVo cables. At the very end of our test of singe X1950XTX card from PowerColor we also received ASUS's version and decided to include this card to the review and - of course - use it for Part II - testing in CrossFire mode. ASUS's X1950XTX has four CD's - multilanguage user's manual, drivers, Project Showblind and Ghost Recon, with a beautiful leather CD-wallet. Of course, there's a whole bunch of cables and connectors inside - two DVI-VGA adapters, composite and S-Video cable, HDTV/ViVo cables (Composite and Component). Quite a nice bundle, if I may add.
The first thing you notice about the card is it's size - it's pretty big, fat and heavy. Of course, for a high-end card, dual slot cooling is a pretty natural thing, but even though it's quite a bit better then ones that appeared on generations before, it's also copper-based which makes it very heavy. In all fairness, it also isn't so noisy (although it does the small-Boeing type of sound when you put it under stress), which is highly commendable. So, kuddos for design. With 384 million transistors and 512MB GDDR4 memory (working at 2x1GHz, while the core works at 650MHz), this is what you'd expect from the cooling system. Even with these solutions, we gotta say that this card is really hot when under load. Really, really hot...
The card itself has one PCI-E power connector (8800GTX has two, 8800GTS also has one), so you shouldn't run into any problems with your non-high-end PSU on that account. You should, however, watch out about the power usage. The information we obtained say that one X1950XTX can use up to 210W of power. Take this into consideration when you're assembling a system with this card.

We decided to put these cards through its paces with our usual testbed:

- EVGA 680i-based motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
- Western Digital RaptorX
- OCZ Platinum XTC PC2-8000 2x1GB
- OCZ PowerStream 600W
- Coolermaster Aquagate cooling system
- Dell 3007W monitor

The benchmark suite includes 3dMark 2005, 2006, Battlefield, Company Of Heroes, F.E.A.R., Oblivion, Prey and X3 Demo. Also, we used only two of the usual three AA/AF settings - 4xAA/16xAF and 8xAA/16xAF. The reason is the fact that this card just can't handle more then this, not at these resolutions we use for testing. With 3dMark 2005 score of 12.821 and 3dMark 2006 scored 6543 with this setup, we had a quite nace start for a "prev-gen" card...