I cant afford the powerbill for such a 150W+ card. The card is cheap, running it aint. It will use more than my current total system alone.

Call me crazy but having a review 3 weeks before a product launch is a little rediculous? I guess this might be to ensure ATi have adequate stock so its not a paper launch (although for us buyers it is a paper launch for 3 weeks)? Why did they want the review out now and not a day or two before the launch date, simply to steal Nvidias 7900GT thunder?

Um benchmarking aside, are we getting to framerates where we might as well have toggles in the game setup page to assign an upper limit to framerate to save power and leave more CPU for the AI?

I wish you guys [TR] would update this page with all the latest video cards specs:

http://techreport.com/etc/comparo/graphics/

Last update was back in the time of the Radeon X850XT-PE and the Geforce 7800GTX, so that's a while ago. I love that page, I always refer back to it when it's time to advise a friend for upgrades and such.

Also I find it too bad that they [Ati & nVidia] don't support AGP anymore. At least nVidia made an effort with their 7800GS(or something like that). I've read a review somewhere a while ago that compared PCI-Express x16 to x4, and it made no difference in the benchmarks really. That means that most cards don't even use 1GB/s of bandwidth, and that's the same bandwidth as AGP4x. Saddens me, cause I still have a kick-ass PC, but I can't really upgrade from an Ati Radeon X800XT-PE. I'm making this next number up, but aren't like 90% of home PCs still using AGP? Aren't these companies targeting a niche market at this point? High-end cards are a niche market in the first place I suppose. Too bad for them I say.

Somebody point me wrong if I am.

Kraft75

cpu's will use less power than the video cards in the upcoming years
just like cpu's back in the day used to use more power than videocards

Only about 15x faster than my card. *sigh*

How noisy?

The one most significant change this brings is a new X1800/1900-compatible cooler.

My 1800XT is lovely, but it'd be nice to have something that doesn't sound like a hair-dryer vigorously cross-breeding with a garden strimmer whilst the belt-sander makes out with the blender from next door.

This review came just in time, answered a question I had wanted to ask. I was wondering if it was worth it to wait until the start of september for a $400 super fast refabbed x1950xt, I don't think I'll wait until mid sept for a somewhat faster $450 card that puts out the same amount of heat and shouldn't clock higher. I'll just get a cheap x1900xt now and strap a new cooler on it. In oblivion it looked like the 512MB helped a good bit at high res(which is what I'll be looking to play at). I'll just get one of those now. MMM new computer.

Why does TR seem to ignore any image quality settings higher than 4x AA? It would be interesting to see how the extra bandwidth effects 6x-AA or higher settings when in CrossFire mode.

The 1950 has to be a serious contender for the most useless upgrade ever (along side the DDR2-donning 9800 PRO 256MB), I hope they got a good price on that memory.

Other than that, G80 and R600 can't come soon enough ...

The X1900XT 256 neatly plugs a hole in ATI's lineup... I have an A8R32-MVP intended for a customer's machine around; thanks to an RMA mixup, I wound up with the board. Perhaps I should create an excuse to use it...

That said, I'm still happy with my SLI 7800GTs, except that they produce more noise than the rest of my case fans combined, and one is developing a distinct whine. Nevertheless, they're sufficiently competitive that I doubt I'll have legitimate cause to upgrade for six to eight months, at which point being behind the curve will become annoying enough that I'll have to take action. ;)

One ancillary and unprofessional note; I'm glad ATI ditched the white plastic cooler design. The new one looks much better, probably offers better cooling, and, hopefully, will be used on future cards.

this just reminds me how good the 7900GT is, good performance, a tiny cooler and very little power consumption.

will ATI's next gen be X2----?

Scott, How much of a differences does the PCI express interface have? the 975x on my Intel badaxe motherboard has 2x 8 lane slots; does that really matter with crossfire?

A bit off topic but has anyone else noticed CCC seems to have shaved 2-3 seconds or so off its opening time with the latest Catalyst 6.8?
Now its only fairly annoying.

the index drop down is broke.
missing a page

No man CCC is evil

ATi tray FTW!

And for #16, that is a sad excuse.

Download Ati tray tools, and quit your whining!

No Soup For u.

I've just got an X1600 XT. I found out that the X1650 Pro's GPU will only be clocked 10MHz higher, but it wil retail for around $99, which is a lot cheaper then the X1600 XT :-(..
Ah well, I guess the graphic card industry will never change in terms of replacing products so fast..

How thoroughly unimpressive. The cheaper X1900XT (Too many Xs!!!) does look nice though.

I would hope ATI would atleast give users the option of enabling crossfire without a mastercard via a driver tweak or something. Mastercards only fit a few select cards. Personally I would take a performance hit over spending a extra $150 for a card that wouldn't even be fully utilized.

It would be interesting to also see what kind of performance hits a dongless configuartion would have. On older crossfire boards you would only get 8x lanes per card but now you get x16 and I wasn't aware a video card saturates a x8 let alone a x16. Maybe passing data over it would be enough to saturate it but would a card simply use double its normal bandwidth for sharing partial data with another card over the bus?

Someone should hack a ATI driver just just to see :P

Also if you want to more accurately compare cards with GRAW you can manually overide settings in the renderer_settings.xml

...\Ghost Recon 3\Data\settings\renderer_settings.xml

There is also some options to tweak GRAW to use more graphical memory for higher end cards. There are quite a few tweak guides laying around the net.

I would have liked to have seen numbers on the X1650Pro ... it's mentioned at the start of the review and then forgotten about.

No comments on noise levels? I'm not sure if it was here at TR or elsewhere, but I recall an audio clip being posted comparing the noise levels of a Radeon 19xx and GeForce 79xx in Oblivion.

The result? I was shocked at how much quieter the GeForce was - this would affect my buying decision.. don't know about others...

I'm an enthusiast. Will I see linux testing if I read this review?

Nice card. Too bad CCC hasn't gone away. I certainly won't be replacing my 9800 Pro with another ATI card when I build a Core 2 Duo system in October for that reason only. Maybe AMD will fix it.

Nice work guys!

Yet another vote for the X1900 XT 512MB. That'll likely be my next card.

I already have the X1900XT 512 card and let me tell you is it a beauty. If/when i decide to go Crossfire, will I be able to link my X1900XT with the X1950 Crossfire? I am assuming so since they are still the same series right.

I am happy my 7900GTX is not the behind in the competetion..

Yep the X1900XT 512MB is a nice card for the price now.
I have one sitting on my coffee table awaiting the Mobo/RAM and Conroe E6700 that's going to be the core of my new build.
As for the new X1950XTX,it looks to be incrementally faster than the current series,and the price is fairly good for a top end card.
Guess we'll have to wait for R600 before we see as good performance as the 7950 NVidia tho.