PowerColor Radeon X1900 XTX

PowerColor Radeon X1900 XTX

Back of the card

PowerColor is one of ATI’s oldest board partners, with products dating all the way back to the Rage128 chip. PowerColor is also one of the world’s largest graphics providers, with extensive distribution channels, allowing them to get their cards to market quickly and with pricing that is very competitive. You may also find some people refer to PowerColor as TUL, which stands for Technology Unlimited. In 2004, PowerColor’s parent company, CP Technology changed their name from CP to Technology Unlimited.

To coincide with the name change, TUL completely overhauled its look and decided to place greater emphasis on the retail space, particularly among the enthusiast market. PowerColor completely revised their product packaging and began to really seek out input on what kind of features enthusiasts wanted in a high-end graphics card. The result is that PowerColor revamped their cards game bundles and began to produce high-end cards that were targeted towards enthusiasts under the “Bravo Edition” label. The first of these cards was PowerColor’s 9600 XT Bravo Edition. This board shipped with faster memory modules than other 9600 XT cards and was overclocked from the factory.

PowerColor continued this trend into 2005, with their X800 Bravo Edition. The X800 Bravo board shipped with 1.6ns GDDR3 memory modules from Samsung, good for speeds up to 600MHz. These were the same memory modules used on X800 XT Platinum Edition cards; even X800 XL boards used slower 2.0ns memory. PowerColor also outfitted their X800 Bravo board with dual DVI connections – another first for the X800 – a component video cable, and VIVO. When we reviewed PowerColor’s X800 Bravo Edition back in February 2005 we were floored with its performance, outrunning the GeForce 6600 GT and GeForce 6800 for a similar price point and earning our Editor’s Choice Award in the process. PowerColor followed it up with a number of other high-end cards that were targeted towards enthusiasts. Their X800 GT card for example used ATI’s 0.13-micron R480 core, allowing it to scale to higher frequencies more easily when overclocking than competitors R420-based X800 GT boards.

In January 2006 PowerColor went one step further to appeal to the enthusiast/high-end segment, offering a lifetime warranty on all of their retail graphics cards. Any PowerColor graphics card purchased on or after January, 24, 2006 in the US or Canada is covered by PowerColor’s lifetime warranty. The warranty is provided to the original purchaser of the card, as long as the card isn’t physically damaged you’re covered for as long as you own your PowerColor graphics card. All you have to do is register your card with PowerColor and keep the retail packaging it shipped with.

PowerColor packaging

PowerColor is the only ATI board manufacturer to provide a lifetime warranty on their cards, so if this feature is important to you, you’ll definitely want to keep PowerColor in mind when shopping for your next ATI-based graphics card.

In terms of the hardware itself, PowerColor’s Radeon X1900 XTX board looks identical to ATI’s reference X1900 XTX board. PowerColor doesn’t even bother to place a sticker with their company logo on the card’s fan!

Software and accessories

PowerColor doesn’t include a game bundle with their Radeon X1900 XTX card. Instead you get a driver CD and a DVD with several Cyberlink programs including:

1. PowerDirector-Video Editing


2. MediaShow-Photo slideshow


3. MusicMatch-MP3 ripping and playback


4. PowerBackup-Data backup


5. PowerDVD-DVD Movie Playback


6. PowerProducer-DVD authoring and burning


7. Power2Go-Data/music burning


8. PowerDVD coopy-one-step DVD copy

In addition to the driver CD and Cyberlink suite DVD, PowerColor also includes two DVI adapters, a 6-pin PCI-E power adapter, S-Video and composite video cables, a component video cable, and VIVO cable.