Four-hundred-bucks people ...

On Monday I got informed that this product will e-tail for 399 EUR and for that money the Radeon X1950 XTX is mighty impressive, it's Godzilla strapped in silicon with the capital G.

Let's talk a little what you'll get for that money. You can get extreme gaming performance throughout any game you run. All resolutions will be available to you while maintaining very good IQ options versus performance up-to 1920x1200. And I just wish we would have had the chance to test this puppy in Crossfire because that would have stretched our limit and do a comparison with Quad SLI as ATI is marketing this with much joy.

But hey .. that just wasn't the case. I do think the X1950 is really impressive. It's battling here and there with the more expensive GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB and for 399 .. that's just staggering. I can only imagine what two of these cards will do in Crossfire as it really is impressive performance. Okay I'll shut up now about the Crossfire thing.

Don't get fooled though, the X1950 XTX is the X1900 XTX .. yet with the one difference: namely gDDR4 memory. The extremely high memory bandwidth in this solution will boost scores in higher than average resolutions versus the highest IQ settings. Next to that high-level of performance you'll receive a card with the new design dual-slot cooler. This cooler is far better then the previous model, it's way less audible and does it's job really well. Granted; once the card is getting hot it'll make an audible low pitch sound which I do not like, yet it's not really frustrating or anything. The last fact is of course the price .. it's cheaper than a X1900 XTX so how can you lose on that ?

Playing games at 1920x1200 with high IQ settings enabled was not at all an issue, everything was silky smooth in terms of way above average framerates. You just do not need to compromise on image quality which is great. Do look a little outside the box though and realize the card is more than just am item to play games with. It's also a media encoder and accelerator as well. This means your CPU does not have to decode a HD movie, nope your graphics card will do that for you and with the new AVIVO functionality you can bet it's at very high quality. The card is H.264 at 1080P ready! Fantastic stuff if you decide to hook up the card to a HD screen for example, that's magic on your screen man. Stability .. okay, this might be a refresh product, but not once did we experience a hiccup in the form of a crash or even freeze, impressive. The Radeon series come with a rock-solid driver package, they are well developed (although BIG) and working really sweetly.

512MB memory .. GDDR4 .. 2x1 GHz tact frequency ... yowza ! I'm loving it (padapapapaaah). It's simple, the more bandwidth the more candy you can enable as your videocard framebuffer will result in faster performance. Graphics cards always have been limited by framebuffer bandwidth. So once you do get a memory boost like we saw with this sweet gDDR4 memory you can expect a better performing gaming experience with complex IQ settings.

So again .. a bucket-load of functionality, features, a stack-load of performance and a really sweet price. I have no clue how ATI can go wrong with this product as it is really good.

My conclusion ? Short and simple .. this card is a beast.

I hope to have another review up soon, with other Radeon cards in the comparison and some actual overclocking results. Time... I need time! :)