Every man and his dog seems to be waiting around for mid-range DirectX 10 parts from both ATI and NVIDIA, but neither has actually announced anything on that front yet. If you're not looking to upgrade to Windows Vista any time soon though, there is still plenty of life left in Windows XP. Typically, when ATI or NVIDIA launches a new product, all of the board partners sell essentially the same card with no changes to either PCB design or heatsink design. The only way for them to really differentiate themselves at launch is to offer better value for money than the competition in what has turned into an incredibly volatile marketplace, going for the lowest price tag. - Bit-Tech

PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO SCS3 Edition Review

In fact, it's not until partners have had hardware in their hands for quite some time before we really start to the fruits of them thinking outside of the box. At this point, we start to see products that really differentiate themselves from the rest of the field. This is, arguably, where retail graphics cards actually get a bit more interesting, because the board partners have the chance of catching the eyes of end users that would naturally move right away from the reference cooling design due to it being overly noisy, or a little inadequate. Today, we're having a look at one such product,the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO SCS3 Edition.

Despite the card being passively cooled, it still manages to keep in touch with the Radeon X1950 PRO's reference specifications. ATI's 80 nanometre RV570 chip is under the grill and set to Gas Mark 5, meaning all 36 pixel shaders, 12 texture units, 8 vertex shaders and 12 raster operators are fully functional. All of this simmers along at 575MHz, meaning the chip can spit out around 6,900 million pixels every second at peak. Also, the GPU supports ATI's high quality anisotropic filtering algorithm too. However, NVIDIA corrected the quite telling image quality differences with the GeForce 8 series architecture.

The stock clocks for PowerColor's silent cooled Radeon X1950 PRO are 575MHz on the core, and 1380MHz effective for the memory. After several hours of frustration, we finally got the card running stably at 600MHz core, but the memory didn't want to move from its stock clock. Every time we pushed the memory clock above 1350MHz, we were greeted with the infamous blank screen and the only way to get a signal back was to do a hard reset. You could say our overclocking experiences with this card were poor, but then we didn't expect much more given the fact it's a passively cooled card.

Although PowerColor's Radeon X1950 PRO SCS3 is not currently available in the UK, it's expected to hit the shelves very soon. Understandably, the retail pricing is going to be a little higher than a typical Radeon X1950 PRO, and thus we're expecting this to hit stores with a retail price around £130-140. Ideally, the Radeon X1950 XT 256MB is arguably a better choice for gaming on a budget, but that card will set you back an extra £20. Given the reasonable price differential between the two, each card has its niche and PowerColor's card represents a great buy if its performance is strong in the titles that you're playing.