Powercolor X1900XT 512mb

Image Quality

With the top-end cards that are out now image quality has to be the final judgement. The ATI cards have far superior IQ to the nVidia cards at this time. The Higher Quality Anisotropic Filtering and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing of the ATI drivers and cards makes todays games look simply awesome. nVidia’s cards can run at settings approaching what ATI’s cards can but they do have a problem with shimmering textures in games. This leaves their cards trailing in many people’s eyes.

I have to temper this with a comment on ATI’s drivers. They are using a .NET implementation and to a lot of people this feels very slow and “bloaty”. nVidia’s drivers are at this time easier to use and less heavy.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that the X1900XT is a great piece of hardware. With a current price of £293 from SpecialTech this card is a great deal and very much “bang-for-buck.

If you don’t mind putting up with a slightly whiney card under load and want something very fast at this time then the Powercolor is definately the card to go for. I do have to add that you should be aware of the facts from my ATI DX10/Vista Write-up before you decide on a new card.

Pro’s

+ Very fast card
+ Overclocks easily to XTX speeds
+ ATI’s awesome IQ
+ Great value for money

Con’s

– Very loud fan under load
– ATI’s “bloatware” drivers

The Powercolor X1900XT gets 8.5/10 with a “Value Award” and “Recommended”

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