Sapphire RADEON X1950 PRO

I bought this card about a month ago and since then I have had sufficient time to test it and see if my money was well spent, here is my short review of the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO.

The Radeon X1950 Pro was designed to replace ATI's older midrange card, the Radeon X1800 GTO. With a 580 MHz core clock speed and 512MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 1,4GHz, the Radeon X1950PRO boasts a faster core clock and memory speeds than the Radeon X1800 GTO.

Like most midrange to high-end graphics cards, the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO requires a link to your PC's power supply. Most PCs with a 300-to-400-watt power supply should be able to handle a single card, and ATI recommends at least a 550-watt power supply for CrossFire mode.

The Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO's fan runs very quiet under stress and did not generate too much heat which was perfect for me.

I tried the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO on some of the most stressing games I own, these including Oblivion, Half Life 2 Episode Two and the Crysis Single Player Demo. Test were taken with a resolution of 1280X1024, maximum settings and 8X AF.

Oblivion: Ran fine outside with practically no stuttering at all, I was surprised by this since I know that Oblivion, even now has the ability to make the most powerful cards fall to their knees unless you have the processor to back it up.

Half Life 2 Episode Two: Valve recently released this work of computerized art with some new graphical enhancements over Episode One. The Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO had no problems at all with this game and happily ran it at 60FPS from start to finish.

Crysis: Now this game is probably the most stressing game out for current generation Hardware as I type this, the games beauty hides a resource hungry monster ready to rip apart any Graphics Card that dare tries to show it on screen. Unfortunately, since this is the Crysis Pre-Release Demo, the game did not allow total maximum settings and what I am about to say might not be accurate at the time of final release.

The Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO ran the Crysis Demo on high settings without DirectX9 at a decent 30FPS which is great for this card, however, it did tend to stutter when there were a lot objects on screen. Hopefully when the full game gets released, the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO will run much better due to optimizations.

Conclusion: In all, I am very happy with the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO as a value seeking customer, the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO may not have the latest technology such as DirectX 10 but it packs a wallop and should happily run tomorrows games without too much trouble. For this price I would grab one while you can find one.