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- Date:
- Wednesday, January 31, 2007
- Author:
- Mark Warner
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO Extreme 256 MB
Can PowerColor's Radeon X1950 PRO Extreme Edition overcome its price premium and offer better performance than the GeForce 7900 GS? Will the enlarged cooling unit help with overclocking? We will take a look and tell you exactly which video card is the better value.
PowerColor was founded in California in April of 1999. They exclusively manufacture video cards, and they use only ATI GPUs. Unlike many so-called manufacturers, PowerColor actually physically produces their video cards in their own factory. Since our first PowerColor evaluation in 2002, we have evaluated four additional PowerColor video cards. They are not the best-known brand, but their hardware quality has always been top-notch. PowerColor's product lineup is extensive, ranging from Radeon 7000 based PCI graphics adaptors, all the way up to the highest-end Radeon X1950 XTX based CrossFire PCI-Express x16 video cards. In the fashion of eVGA and BFGTech, PowerColor now offers a lifetime warranty, though it is currently only extended to their Radeon X1900 and X1950 family of video cards, and only on products purchased on or after January 24, 2006.
Today, we have the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO Extreme 256 MB video card up for evaluation. It features the ATI Radeon X1950 PRO GPU and 256 MB of GDDR3.
ATI Radeon X1950 PRO GPU
The ATI Radeon X1950 PRO GPU was introduced in October of 2006, and is one of the first GPUs to be manufactured on an 80nm process. It has 36 pixel shader processors and 8 vertex shader units. ATI reports that the power draw on the Radeon X1950 PRO should be about 75 watts, and double that in a CrossFire configuration. The reference design calls for a 575 MHz GPU clock frequency, and for the video cards to be equipped with GDDR3 at 1.38 GHz DDR (690 MHz actual).
The PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO Extreme 256 MB comes with the GPU factory overclocked to 600 MHz, and the GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.4 GHz. That makes this a factory overclocked video card, but just barely. The GPU is only overclocked by 25 MHz which is 4% higher, and the memory is only a small 1.4% higher over the specification. That measly overclock is not likely to make much of an appreciable difference in performance in games. However, factory overclocked ATI GPU based video cards are a rarity, therefore PowerColor is offering something unique with that.
PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO Extreme 256 MB
This box is nice and shiny. It has a dark metallic sheen, reminiscent of the polished "titanium" finish found on many power supplies. The front of the box does a good job at informing potential buyers of its features, including VIVO, Dual-DVI, 256 MB of GDDR3, and PCI-Express. It also has a little preview of the cooling device. The side of the box describes system requirements well, noting that you will need a 450 watt power supply to be able to support this video card. The back of the box bears no useful information.
The PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO Extreme 256 MB features an Arctic Cooling Accelero X2 cooling device installed from the factory. Though it does tend to exhaust hot air into the case and raise ambient temperatures, the Accelero X2 does do a good job of keeping the video card running cool and quiet. There are small heat-transfer pads between the memory and the heat-sink, so it appears that the memory benefits directly from the fancy-pants cooler.
Apart from the cooling device, there is nothing remarkable physically about the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO Extreme 256 MB video card. Like most other ATI-based video cards, it is red. However, somewhat unusually, the 6-pin auxilliary power connector is placed in the center on the end of the video card, rather than alongside the top edge.
The backside of this video card, like most, is not home to a lot of interesting features. In fact, the most interesting thing about the back is the fact that you can see how far the cooling device extends over the top of the PCB. Apart from that, there is a tiny little attachment that contains a pair of very small (~1 mm long) dip switches, covered by a thin plastic film. Those dip switches are for switching the TV output between PAL and NTSC.
In the output department, the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO Extreme 256 MB sports a pair of dual-link DVI connectors and the VIVO dongle port.
The bundle is fair, but light on the software side. This video card comes with a driver CD, a quick-start manual, the CyberLink PowerDVD Suite, a single VGA to DVI adaptor, and the native crossfire bridge cable.
On their web site, PowerColor warns that supplies from ATI of the CrossFire bridge are low, so retail boxes of this video card may be without it. However, the bridge cable can be acquired at no cost by calling them and requesting it. Cable-wise, it comes with the 4-pin Molex to 6-pin auxiliary power cable adaptor, a VIVO dongle, a composite video cable, an auxiliary video cable, and a component HD adaptor dongle.
Pricing and Comparison
Currently, Newegg has the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO Extreme 256 MB video card in stock and available for $219.99 USD, or $189.99 after a $30 mail-in rebate. For comparison, we are evaluating the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO Extreme 256 MB against an NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS 256 MB. A BFGTech GeForce 7900 GS can be bought for $199.99 USD at Newegg with a rebate of $20 making it $179.99. On a price-scale, these two video cards are quite competitive. Let's hope, for PowerColor's sake, that performance is competitive as well.