HIS ATi Radeon X1950 XTX IceQ3

With Nvidia retaking the "fastest graphics for a single slot" crown with its dual-PCB, dual-GPU 7950 GX2, ATi was bound to react. It's chosen a fairly conservative route by attaching GDDR4 RAM to a standard X1900 XTX and running these new modules at a whopping 1GHz. This huge 65GB/sec data link between memory and GPU will help when using hi-res textures, but we were curious to see by how much.

As expected, we saw some speed gain over the X1900 XTX, but not a great deal. When testing at 1,600 x 1,200 with our toughest settings, Far Cry rose by 8% from a 53fps to a 57fps average. Call of Duty 2 (CoD2) saw a slightly larger increase in our High Settings test, up 10% from an average of 41fps to 45fps. This test uses the Extra textures of CoD2, which require 512MB of local memory, so the extra RAM-to-GPU bandwidth is really pushed. However, for that performance increase, you pay around 20% extra: the X1900 XTX now costs between £220 and £250, to the £280 of this X1950 XTX.

However, compared to the 7950 GX2, it's a slightly different picture. The cheapest 7950 GX2 we could find was £328 at www.aria.co.uk - 17% more expensive than this HIS card, but only offering an 11% and 16% advantage in Far Cry and CoD2 respectively at the same settings. The X1950 XTX also features AVIVO video enhancement and video transcoder. Best of all, this is the quietest heatsink we've seen in a while on a high-end card.

The only issue for gamers is the imminent release of DirectX 10, with compatible cards expected to arrive in about three months' time. That's not to say that this card won't run the new DirectX10 games, though; it will, and fast, so it's a great choice if you must buy now.

Author: Clive Webster