ATI finally finished up the development of the RV570 chip and drivers. This is the one that you'll find under the hood of the Radeon X1950 PRO card. The RV570 is a redesigned chip with 36 shaders inside, 12 real pipelines and a 256-bit memory interface and a new CrossFire connector. You could consider it as a cut down version of the R580 chip. It is ATI's first real 80 nanometre chip that has been delayed since June/July. It is finally out after this big delay and it is about to take off. It is in production and cards launched today should be in shops as we speak. The version we tested works at 600MHz core and 1400MHz memory. It uses 256-bit GDDR3 memory. - The Inquirer

PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO HDCP Ready Review

The cards will be priced around $229, but we believe ATI will drop the price rather soon to below $200 where it belongs and it is set to fight GeForce 7900 GS cards. Just before filing this article we saw that 256MB cards cost around €200 but we haven't found a single one available. Well give them a day to refresh the database. PowerColor decided to use the Arctic Cooler on its card. It also decided to put 512MB on the card. It made it silent and was cooling it very efficiently and the card should be pretty overclockable. We are talking about a rather chunky cooler but who cares as long as we cool the card right.

The card is equipped with dual DVI's and an Avivo connector. There are two new CrossFire connectors on top of the card. Those two are dual rail connectors branded as CrossFire Bridge Interconnect and it enables to do a read and write at the same time. It should be much faster than the previous CrossFire connectors but we didn't have two cards to try it. The new bridge improves performance and for the first time it doesn't require CrossFire master card to work. The bridge has a 24-bit connection and supports speeds of up to 350MHz. You just need to plug these two cards in CrossFire motherboard.

For once ATI did a good job in the mainstream. It managed to beat NVIDIA at its own game. This is the card to recommend in the sub $200 space. The GeForce 7900 GS is a good card and it shows its strength in Doom 3, Quake 4 and Serious Sam with effects on but it loses in other games. PowerColor did a good job making a silent card that runs rather cold and that will run fast most of the games you can buy today. Having a 256-bit memory controller and a mainstream 80 nanometre part is the way to go and you can see the benefits of it in games with the effects on. It is a mainstream card that I can recommend.