The Sapphire Radeon X1950 GT is directly based on the Radeon X1900 GT series. Like the Radeon X1950 PRO and Radeon X1900 GT it uses AMD's RV570 GPU, which is produced in a 80nm process with 330M transistors. The only change compared to the Radeon X1900 GT is that the core clock is lower. So the Radeon X1900 GT is faster than the Radeon X1950 GT, yet the Radeon X1950 has the faster marketing name, but the lower price. And next to that, the Radeon X1950 PRO's major advantage is that it has 512MB of GDDR3 memory, which costs you about $50 extra. Although, for many users the performance increase does not justify the increased cost. - techPowerUp!

Sapphire Radeon X1950 GT 256MB CrossFire Review

The box styling is typical Sapphire, a white box with some kind of alien on it... Ehm, it's a robot this time. The little window in the package lets you get a good look at the card's pretty blue cooler. On the back you get to know the features of the Radeon X1950 GT in several languages. The package has everything you need to get going. The included CrossFire connector will be useful when you decide to link multiple RV570 cards together, and any Radeon X1950 PRO or GT can be used in CrossFire. This certainly shows some flexibility on building a CrossFire system at a later stage.

Sapphire uses their well established blue PCB color for these cards. The cooler is also customized by Sapphire. Instead of the red transparent ATI cooler, a blue cooler can be found on the card which communicates Sapphire's corporate identity much better. Like you would expect from a high-end video card, two dual link DVI outputs are on the card. So you can attach displays running higher resolutions, like the high definition widescreen LCD displays. If you have an older analog display, you can of course use the included DVI adapters on both ports.

When we first installed the Sapphire Radeon X1950 GT, we were surprised by its super loud annoying fan noise. After talking to Sapphire about this they sent us a new BIOS. With this the card is a lot quieter and much more fun to use. Its performance is of course not comparable to super high-end cards, but for a price of $140 it offers one of the best price to performance ratios in the midrange segment. If you previously thought about getting a Radeon X1600, the Radeon X1950 GT is definitely the better deal. The same applies to similar offerings from NVIDIA.

With a decent overclocking headroom, this card has some extra potential left in it if you are willing to go the overclocking route. Then its performance can surpass the more expensive Radeon X1900 GT and get close to the Radeon X1950 PRO graphics card. However, with only 256MB of video memory it may be too slow if you are looking at high resolutions and beyond.