Sapphire Radeon X1950 GT Graphics Card ATI certainly has a curious strategy. Even though they knew they were coming out with the new Radeon HD 2000 series of graphics cards to replace the X1950 series, they launched the Radeon X1950 GT. Perhaps it is to help clear off their current VPUs before the new graphics cards are launched. If that's the case, then perhaps they should have offered something with a little more muscle. Although ATI is pricing the Radeon X1950 GT as a more cost-effective alternative to the Radeon X1950 Pro, it is actually slower (on paper at least) than its predecessor, the Radeon X1900 GT. It certainly did not impress us in our tests. It was consistently slower than the GeForce 7950 GT. Although it's not really targeted at that card, we have seen earlier that even an overclocked GeForce 7900 GS can beat it flat. Of course, we tested it in a new environment - Windows Vista. But hey, it is the new operating system that everyone is migrating to. If it's certified for Windows Vista, it had better work right in Windows Vista, or are we wrong about that? It's been months since Windows Vista was launched. If they cannot get their Vista driver decently optimized, don't blame us. With the release of ATI's new HD 2000 series of cards, the Sapphire X1950 GT will be a hard sell. Not only is it saddled with the perception that it is "old technology" (which it is), ATI kneecapped it by making it weak. If you can still find one, a Radeon X1900 GT would actually be faster and cheaper. It's not all that bad though. Doom 3 and even Company Of Heroes were all playable at high resolutions. You will have to skip anti-aliasing with the more strenous games, but generally, it can offer reasonably good performance. Just make sure you pay a good low price for it. For more details, read our Comprehensive Review ! MSRP  $150 Lowest PriceGrabber Price  NA Review  Comprehensive Review Graphics Processor  ATI RV570 Manufacturing Process  0.08 Micron (80 Nanometers) Transistor Count  330 Million DirectX Support  9.0c Interface  PCI Express X16 Vertex Shaders  8 Vertex Shader Version  3.0 Pixel Shaders  36 Pixel Shader Version  3.0 Textures Per Clock  12 ROPs  12 Core Clock Speed  500 MHz Fill Rate  6000 MTexels/s Memory Bus Width  256 -bits Memory Size  256 MB Memory Type  GDDR3 Memory Speed  600 MHz (1.2 GHz DDR) Memory Bandwidth  38.40 GB/s DVI Support  Two dual-linked DVI outputs Package Contents • One Sapphire X1950 GT graphics card

• One installation manual

• One card installation warning sticker

• One warranty card

• One Sapphire brochure

• One driver CD

• One video-out cable

• One DVI-to-VGA converter

• One Molex-to-6-pin Y-split cable Our Review System Tech ARP is committed to developing new ways to improve your experience with us. As part of our continuous efforts to improve the value of our reviews to you, we are implementing a multi-tier review system. This review system is designed to allow you to quickly receive information on the latest hardware or software. This new system also allows you to quickly get the gist of the review without reading through it. This can be very useful, especially in situations where you need to make a quick purchase decision. In this new system, we start with a Product Overview whenever a company sends us a press release about their latest product. We shift through extraneous PR-talk to create a straightforward summary of the product's features as well as specifications. This allows you to quickly find out all the pertinent details about the product, without reading through official press releases. When we receive the product for review, we will quickly take photos of it and create a Pictorial Review. The purpose of a pictorial review is to allow you, the reader, to quickly examine the product visually. It may help you make better purchase decisions, especially if you cannot wait for the full review. After thorough testing, we will post a Comprehensive Review of the product. This adds on to the pictorial review with comprehensive test results and our final conclusion on the product. But no matter whether you are reading a Pictorial Review or a Comprehensive Review, you can always read the summary of the review as well as examine the product's specifications right on the first page. In all our new reviews, we will maintain the first page as a Product Overview page. If the product is listed in PriceGrabber, you can also check out the lowest price online. We hope this new review system will make your experience a lot more enjoyable and informative!

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