Board analysis

Another shot of the two PowerColor boards

Bottom of the PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP board

Accelero 2 cooling removed

Awesome cooling

We don’t have an ATI reference X1950 Pro AGP card, so we don’t know how far PowerColor’s X1950 Pro AGP board deviates from the reference board design itself, but one feature we do know PowerColor has added that isn’t found on ATI’s reference board is its cooling: rather than stick with ATI’s stock cooling unit, PowerColor has elected to go with Arctic Cooling’s excellent Accelero 2 cooler.

Dual-slot card

The Accelero 2 has proven popular among ATI enthusiasts looking for a cooler to effectively cool their Radeon X1800 and X1900 cards while also running nearly silently. It’s got six heatpipes for cooling and uses a mixture of copper and aluminum. For greater effectiveness, the 60mm fan is located offset of the graphics core and it relies on a ducted design, although unlike some of Arctic Cooling’s previous coolers, it doesn’t exhaust hot air outside your system’s case.

In our VGA Cooler Mini-Roundup article, we tested the Accelero X2 on an X1900 XTX and found that it delivered an improvement of up to 22 degrees Celsius over the stock ATI cooler all while running quieter than the stock ATI heatsink/fan unit. In fact, at 100% speeds the Accelero 2 topped out at 38 decibels; that was 5 decibels quieter than the stock ATI unit when running dynamically, and over 20 decibels quieter than the stock ATI cooler at 100%. When the Acclero 2’s fan was set to run dynamically based on temperature, we witnessed noise levels as low as 27 decibels under load – that’s practically silent folks!

Because of its outstanding performance, the Arctic Cooling Accelero ended up taking home our Bull’s Eye Award for its outstanding performance and low price.

PowerColor’s X1950 Pro AGP card ships standard with this outstanding cooler out-of-the-box.

While you may not be able to see it in the pictures, the Accelero X2 is a tall heatsink/fan unit. It will eat up the slot directly adjacent to your graphics card, it’s definitely a dual-slot cooler, so you will have to keep this in mind if the slot next to your graphics card is currently occupied.

6-pin power connector

CrossFire connectors go here on PCIe board

At a hair over 9.5” in length, the card is also a little longer than most AGP cards. Here we should note though that the card isn’t any longer than its PCIe-based sibling, both cards share the exact same dimensions as they’re both based on the same PCB. In fact, if you look in the top left corner of the card you can see the cutouts for the two 12-bit CrossFire connectors. The power connector is also placed at the top right corner of the AGP board, whereas on PCIe X1950 Pro cards it’s located in the center. Interestingly enough, it’s a 6-pin PCIe power connector and not the standard Molex power connector you usually see on most AGP cards. Fortunately PowerColor includes a 6-pin power adapter inside the board’s packaging in case your system’s power supply isn’t equipped with a 6-pin connector.

Rialto AGP bridge chip

Flipping the card over, you’ll no doubt notice ATI’s Rialto bridge chip. This little wonder takes the PCI Express signals native to the X1950 Pro, and translates them for use over the AGP bus. In operation the chip does get hot to the touch, but apparently not hot enough to warrant the use of a heatsink. This is probably a good thing though as having a heatsink on the underside of the card could make it tough to install in some motherboards, particularly those with elaborate cooling on the North Bridge of the system chipset.

Rest of the features

In terms of clock speeds, PowerColor has elected to rely on ATI’s stock speeds of 575MHz core/690MHz memory for their X1950 Pro AGP card. The PowerColor website currently reads 600MHz core/700MHz memory, but we’ve confirmed with them that this is indeed a typo and that the board isn’t overclocked from the factory. In terms of connectivity, the board ships with dual DVI connectors and supports HDCP, so you can enjoy HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies in full resolution glory. It also supports S-Video and HDTV output.

Inside the card’s packaging you’ll find your typical mixture of cables and connectors. PowerColor includes a DVI adapter, component video cable for hooking the card up to an HDTV, S-Video cable, composite cable, and the aforementioned power cable. Here we would like to see PowerColor include a second DVI adapter, but in all honesty with the proliferation of DVI-based LCDs this is only a minor complaint. Also included in the card’s packaging is a driver CD and a DVD with various CyberLink software programs, including PowerDVD and a trial version PowerDVD Copy.