ATI Radeon X1900XT 256MB

Overclocking:

We overclocked the Radeon X1900XT 256MB using the 'Overclocker' overclocking utility. It’s a little primitive, but it should give you an idea of what to expect from Radeon X1900XT 256MB when it comes to overclocking. As always though, overclocking mileage may vary in your own experiences and we cannot guarantee that our Radeon X1900XT 256MB isn’t a particularly good overclocker.

The default frequencies for the card are 625MHz on the core, and 1450MHz on the memory. As we mentioned earlier in the review, the card comes with 1.2ns DRAM chips, so there should be some room for overclocking on that front. However, when we overclocked the card, we managed to get the core running stably at 659MHz and the memory was artifact free at 1586MHz. That is a 5% increase in core frequency and a 9% increase in memory performance – neither is massive, but we’re not arguing with additional performance for free.

Final Thoughts...

There is no doubting that ATI’s Radeon X1900XT 256MB comes in at a very attractive price. At around £170 including VAT, you’re getting performance that rivals NVIDIA’s GeForce 7950 GT when it is running at the reference clock speeds. However, the performance gap starts to increase between the 256MB and 512MB Radeon X1900XT’s at the higher resolutions in modern games because of a shortage of memory.

Comparing directly to the Radeon X1900XT 512MB, we found that we had to lower texture details or anti-aliasing quality settings in both The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Battlefield 2 in order to maintain smooth gameplay. Also, generally speaking (with the exception of Oblivion) we found that the GeForce 7950 GT was a better performer on a 24” widescreen LCD. Although there are these performance differences as a result of the reduced memory footprint, we must remember that there is also a significant price difference between the 256MB and 512MB versions of Radeon X1900XT - we’re looking at over £70 to increase the memory footprint from 256MB to 512MB.

In fact, the Radeon X1900XT 256MB slips in below reference-clocked GeForce 7950 GT cards and is typically around £30 cheaper. Taking that into account, we think that the Radeon X1900XT 256MB is a worthy consideration if you’re looking for a hell of a lot of performance for well-under £200. However, if you are looking for something to last a bit longer, taking into account that more and more games are showing benefits from having a 512MB memory footprint at very high resolutions, your money may be better spent on something with 512MB of onboard memory.

The one thing that concerns me is the lack of support for HDCP. However, if HDCP isn’t a concern of yours and you are just looking for a cheap but powerful video card capable of playing games well at 1920x1200, the Radeon X1900XT 256MB is probably it in the short term. However, if you are looking for something to last you through next year playing games at 1920x1200, but don’t want to wait for DirectX 10 hardware to arrive, we think that it is worth spending a little more on either the Radeon X1900XT 512MB or one of the overclocked GeForce 7950 GT’s.

The other thing that concerns me is the noise that the cooler makes. If you factor in the cost of a replacement cooling solution, the price isn’t quite as attractive as it first seems. Typically, a decent replacement cooler is going to set you back in the region of £15-25, depending on whether you choose one of Arctic Cooling’s Accelero coolers or one of Zalman’s VF900-series VGA coolers.

With all of that said though, if you are looking to play games on lower resolution panels, or even on an older CRT monitor, the Radeon X1900XT 256MB represents a very solid purchase because it performs very similarly to the considerably more expensive 512MB version of the card. If you can put up with the cooler or are prepared to buy a replacement, we think that Radeon X1900XT 256MB will serve you well until performance mainstream DirectX 10 hardware arrives next year.