Introduction

You would think that the Radeon X1950PRO would just about be discontinued, with the new mid-range graphics cards from Nvidia offering Direct X 10 and the HD 2600 just around the corner, why would you even bother looking at the AMD DX9 counterpart?

Well the new Nvidia cards come with an increased price tag and do not seem to offer the punch that the last generations do in DX 9 games. If you are not looking at jumping onto the DX 10 bandwagon straight away the X1950PRO and 7900GS are still very real examples of mid-range graphics cards you would consider buying.

The particular card we are looking at today is the SCS3 X1950PRO from PowerColor, which has a very well endowed heat sink on it allowing it to run silent. Because of this we do not expect the card to be a good overclocker, but we still want to test how the card performs at stock speeds. After all, you should not have to sacrifice performance just because you want a quiet system.

The particular sample we received did not come with a retail box so we will just move on to have a look at what comes in the package along with a quick look at the card before we get stuck straight into the benchmarking.