Just $199 for the X1950 Pro is a pretty sweet deal. Compared to the 7900 GS it’s definitely faster and scales just as well in Crossfire with the new internal bridges. It’s also very quiet, certainly no louder than the 7900 GS cooler, and it doesn’t get very hot. It’s quite a bit longer though, which I guess might cause some problems if you plan on cramming it inside a really small case or something, but overall the length is nothing to really worry about.

It’s hard to find anything negative to say about it really, though if there’s one thing it’s the same thing I usually say about new ATI products; Availability. ATI has said that this would be a hard launch and it’s true that the X1950 Pro is already showing up on shelves, but right now the prices are way higher than what they should be. Taking a quick look around I see some retailers trying to sell them for as much as $300 which is just ridiculous considering you can get an X1900 XT with 512MB for that price. You’d be wise to wait for wider availability of the cards, which should reduce prices to more reasonable levels, before buying.

The one thing that has made me, personally, very happy about the X1950 Pro is the introduction of the internal Crossfire bridges. Along with a much higher level of user friendliness, more importantly performance using the internal bridges is up too. Crossfire scaling is much higher than “software” Crossfire, obviously, and from what I can tell it’s also a bit higher than the external dongle too. Scaling even seems to be on par with NVIDIA’s SLI in most cases too. Yeah there are two of them, but who cares; there could be 50 of them covering every inch of the board for all I care. I’m just happy that that cursed external dongle is on the way out. You can’t truly appreciate how much I hate that thing until you have to work with it for hours on end day in and day out benchmarking videocards. I hope we never see anything like that again from anyone.

With the evolutionary advancements made with Crossfire, the successful move to an 80nm manufacturing process, and the low low asking price, I think that the X1950 Pro represents a inconspicuous but significant step forward for ATI.

For those of you on a tight budget, I don’t think there’s a better graphics card out there right now.