PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro Extreme with Arctic Cooling System Review

Introduction

Radeon X1950 Pro is targeted to gamers that want a high-end video card but don’t want to give an arm to buy the most expensive one – which, in the case of ATI, is Radeon X1950 XTX. What is really sweet about this model from PowerColor is that it comes with Arctic Cooling’s Accelero X2 VGA cooler already assembled on the card, which is a very high-end and silent cooling solution. Let’s compare the performance of this video card with its main competitors.

Figure 1: PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro.

Radeon X1950 Pro runs officially at 575 MHz with its memory being accessed at 1.38 GHz (690 MHz x 2) and has 36 pixel shader engines. Radeon X1950 Pro looks like a Radeon X1900 GT with a higher memory clock rate, as Radeon X1900 GT runs at the same clock rate and has the same number of pixel shader engines, but accesses memory at a lower rate, 1.2 GHz (600 MHz x 2). On the other hand, all other cards on the Radeon X1900 and X1950 families have higher specs, especially because they all have 48 pixel shader engines.

For a full comparison between Radeon X1950 Pro and other chips from ATI, please read our tutorial ATI Chips Comparison Table. On NVIDIA Chips Comparison Table you can compare them to competitors from NVIDIA.

We measured the clock rates used by the reviewed card using PowerStrip and we found out that this card was running at 594 MHz and accessing its memory at 695 MHz x 2 (1.39 GHz). We tried to reduce these clock rates down to the official specs but the card freezed, which is rather strange. So we kept it running with these clock rates on our benchmarking.

On Figures 2 and 3 you can see the reviewed card from PowerColor. As you can see, Radeon X1950 Pro supports the new Native CrossFire system (notice the two edge connectors on the top left corner of the board).

Figure 2: PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro.

Figure 3: PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro, back view.