The ATI Radeon X1950 PRO has been launched for a couple of days now and press releases announcing the various offerings from vendors have been making the rounds. Looking through all these releases, we noticed a trend of these vendors preferring third party or in-house customized coolers. In other words, few manufacturers are using the reference ATI cooler. Instead, two slot solutions are rather popular, with brands like ASUS and PowerColor opting for them. One would think that most consumers would be in favor of a single slot cooler against a larger one but it seems that the vendors have different ideas. Or perhaps ATI's reference cooler may not be as good as advertised. - Hardware Zone

ASUS Extreme AX1950 PRO HDCP Compliant Review

Like we said, we aren't too sure why large two slot coolers seem popular for the Radeon X1950 PRO despite the introduction of ATI's own single slot reference solution. The mystery persist more so because this SKU uses a new 80nm die that should be less demanding than the castrated R580 chips used on the older Radeon X1900 GT cards. Naturally, a single slot cooler has its advantages, provided that performance is not compromised. For the ASUS Extreme AX1950 PRO, it was quiet and frankly, we couldn't really distinguish between that and the one we found on the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO.

As long as we don't notice the cooler in action, it's a good sign that the thermal buster is doing a good job. Granted that the temperatures recorded are in the low region. According to ATI, the specifications for the Radeon X1950 PRO are 575MHz for the core and 1380MHz for the memory. ASUS has tweaked the clocks slightly, giving us a core running at 580MHz while the memory was also boosted to 1400MHz. The impact on the benchmarks is likely to be limited but yes, technically, one could say that the ASUS is overclocked. The Extreme AX1950 PRO comes with HDCP support, which has become a new standard.

To our dismay, the ASUS Extreme AX1950 PRO does not come with the CrossFire bridge, which is supposed to ship with every Radeon X1950 PRO. The idea was when you acquire a pair, you would get the two bridges as well and you could have the internal CrossFire solution up and running. According to ASUS, the reason is that the company is offering a CrossFire Edition package that will immediately provide two of the bridges, along with an enhanced bundle and feature set. This idea works to ASUS' advantage since they can ship a leaner package with the standard cards and pass the savings on to users.

However, this also creates a dependency to be anchored to ASUS for your second graphics card if you decide CrossFire them. We suppose consumers could go out and purchase the connector themselves if they want to mix and match cards, but it does seem like a disservice to the consumer. ASUS may change this policy to have just one standard SKU, but there's no word about that at the time of publishing. The presence of a premium Radeon X1950 PRO edition from ASUS was also probably why unlike the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO, this card did not come with a Rage Theater chip.

At the moment, we have no hesitations in recommending ATI for quite a few price segments. The lower to mid-range still seem to favor NVIDIA slightly but who knows, things may change again by the end of this month, when the Radeon X1650 XT gets released. However, the high-end segment is definitely more balanced now, with ATI having the slight edge. Of course, you may disagree, especially if the dual-GPU GeForce 7950 GX2 is your fancy while there is also the shadow of NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series hovering to spoil the ATI party. Everything should be made clear by mid November however, some exciting period ahead.

As for the ASUS Extreme AX1950 PRO, its miniscule hop in clock speeds compared to the reference version will not result in any discernible performance increment. For that matter, the ASUS was for the most part the performance equal of the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO, which was also slightly overclocked. It just goes to show that how ineffectual such overclocking is in real life. However, we also found that the Radeon X1950 PRO seemed to be quite intolerant of overclocking, so enthusiasts will probably not have too much luck pushing this card. Other aspects of the ASUS fared on par with the PowerColor.

However, removing the CrossFire connector from the product does seem like an awkward approach that's going back to the old days. No doubt, ASUS probably wanted to focus on its CrossFire version but then this lesser version doesn't come cheap either. We were quoted a price of $225 and considering its overall package, the ASUS Extreme AX1950 PRO is not very price competitive. Although the hardware itself looks fine and is above our expectations, ASUS products often tend to be slightly pricey due to the brand and perception that its products are of better quality; this card is a lean and bloat free Radeon X1950 PRO.