As 'Back to the Future' proved, it's no use having a time-travelling car from the future if you don't have anything with which to fuel it. DirectX 10 cards such as Nvidia's GeForce 8800-series seem to have travelled from the future, and a world where games have more realistic fog and shinier water. However, like Doc Brown's DeLorean, trapped in the 1950s without any plutonium to power it, DirectX 10 graphics cards are trapped in a world where DirectX 10 games are hard to find.
With this in mind, it's worth bearing in mind that boring old mid-range DX9-only cards can still happily chew their way through the latest DX9 games. What's more, since cards such as PowerColor's passively cooled X1950 Pro SCS3 don't have a chance of competing with even a 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS in terms of raw performance, they also have attractively low price tags.
We've seen plenty of Radeon X1950 Pros in previous issues, but PowerColor's SCS3 is the first passively cooled card we've reviewed. Gone is the reference HSF, and in its place is Arctic Cooling's new Accelero S2. This is a massive aluminium heatsink without a fan in sight, just a series of fins connected by six heatpipes to a copper block covering the GPU. There's a fairly obvious flaw with this design though: because the fins protrude so far over the edge of the card, the internal CrossFire cable won't be long enough to reach the CrossFire sockets on the edge of the second card, so using two SCS3s in a CrossFire setup is out of the question. This is a surprising oversight, considering that the X1950 Pro was one of the first Radeons to dispense with the need for a Master card and the clunky external dongle. However, passively cooled cards aren't the best choice for dual-graphics card setups anyway, so perhaps we're being greedy.
Aside from opting for a passive cooler, PowerColor has stuck to the reference formula. The card is equipped with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, as opposed to the 512MB found on PowerColor's previous Radeon X1950 Pro. This is a sensible move, as the extra memory simply adds to the price without offering any more performance at the mid-range resolutions to which the GPU is best suited. The GPU is clocked at the reference speed of 575MHz, although the memory has been overclocked from the reference speed of 600MHz to 690MHz (1.38GHz effective).
Of course, with prices of the Radeon X1950XT plummeting, it has become the Radeon X1950 Pro's main competitor, and it's a significantly more powerful GPU. The X1950 Pro has fewer pixel processors than the Radeon X1950XT - 36 compared with the XT's 48 - and fewer ROPs, with 12 as opposed to 16.
Like all the other X1950 Pros we've seen, the PowerColor offered solid performance in our test games at 1,280 x 1,024, but became a little shaky at higher resolutions. An average of 53fps and minimum of 26fps were enough to tempt us to play at 1,680 x 1,050 in F.E.A.R. but, in some of the tougher sections, a slight jerkiness revealed that this pushes the card to its limit. It was a similar story in Prey; for the most part, the game ran smoothly, but when the giblets really started to fly, things could have been a little smoother for our tastes.
Disappointingly, Need for Speed: Carbon was too much for the X1950 Pro - 1,280 x 1,024 was the highest resolution that produced a smooth frame rate. Despite the fact that it's a passively cooled graphics card, we tried overclocking the PowerColor. Predictably, we couldn't coax any more than another 5MHz out of the GPU, and nothing from the memory.
Conclusion The PowerColor may not have enough oomph to play Need for Speed: Carbon at 1,680 x 1,050, but it's powerful enough to play Prey, F.E.A.R. and the older but better-looking Need for Speed: Most Wanted at this resolution, though only just; however, it's far more comfortable at a resolution of 1,280 x 1,024, which it can handle with a smattering of AA and AF. Still, the PowerColor's ace isn't speed, but its ability to deliver what performance it can silently. This is a good job, since ATi's price cuts have made the Radeon X1950XT far and away the best buy at this price for those who are mainly concerned with fast frame rates.
Author: Chris Lee
PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3