First of the line is the underwhelming Radeon X1950PRO using the funky new “Call of Juarez” themed box from Gigabyte. The front of the box gives us the normal spiel, with a few points worth pointing out; Gigabyte’s decision to use all solid capacitors which offer a better life span, the fact that there is a Zalman HSF installed along with a copy of Call of Juarez. We also see that it’s Windows Vista ready – we wonder if this means it won’t pull itself out of oblivion if the HSF decides to stop working.
Turning the box over we have some more information that is specific to the chipset on offer as opposed to the actual card. We can see that with a second one you’re able to make use of Crossfire - if you look closely, you will see that you simply just need another Crossfire ready card though not a master card. The X1950PRO is the first card in the ATI line up that is able to make use of the new internal Crossfire method, like nVidia SLI.
Moving to the guts of the package we have ourselves a copy of Call of Juarez, driver CD, Molex to PCI Express power connector, a couple DVI to VGA connectors, break out box for TV Out and the new internal Crossfire connector. It would have been nice to see some cables included so you can make use of the TV Out functionality out of the box but hopefully this is something Gigabyte notes later down the track.
With the package out the way and moving onto the card, it is a bit freaky looking at an ATI card not only without its trademark red PCB but also the addition of nVidia SLI-like connectors across the top. We can clearly see the stand out feature of the card is the inclusion of the Zalman heat sink fan that combines both aluminum and copper to help dissipate heat – they don’t look too bad either!
Doing a quick sweep on the card we can see a few things - as typically, we have our PCI Express power connector to the left of the card, moving along to the top we have the new Crossfire connector which works similar to that of SLI but two connectors are needed to transmit data back and forth. The back of the card is pretty typical with our normal array of circuitry and stickers.
The I/O side of things gives us our Dual DVI ports which support Dual Link DVI and the little S-Video connector that our break out box connects to so you can make use of the TV-Out functionality that is on offer from the Radeon X1950PRO.
Overall the card is pretty good looking and you will notice that when you throw it up against the 7900GS offering the cards look extremely similar with only a few key differences separating them.
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