[H]ard|OCP reviews ATI Radeon X1950 Pro video card
This fall, 2006, we have been seeing some fierce competition between NVIDIA and ATI. In fact, it hasn't even been a full two months since ATI's last product announcement, the ATI Radeon X1950 series family, yet here we sit today ready to tell you all about another new video card from ATI. In fact, this will not be the only video card being announced this month from ATI either. Understand that these are still DirectX 9 Radeon X1000 series GPU based and not ATI's next generation technology. We do hope to see that eventually, but it doesn't appear to be on the radar anytime soon.
If you refer back to our evaluation of the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX you find what made the X1950 XTX unique. It was the first video card to use GDDR4 memory technology and push the memory clock speeds up to a very fast 2 GHz frequency. Our testing showed this was by far the fastest single-GPU video card, and even rivaled the NVIDIA's dual-GPU video card. The ATI Radeon X1950 XTX also introduced a new cooling solution that is much more quiet and efficient at cooling. ATI also introduced another new video card, the Radeon X1650 Pro. This video card however does not use GDDR4, instead it is simply a faster clocked Radeon X1600 XT, but labeled with the "X1650 Pro" moniker. ATI's thinking here is that there will be faster video cards in the Radeon X1650 series to come, and indeed there will be with that announcement later this month. Today however ATI is expanding on the new Radeon X1950 series...
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