The chaps over at FiringSquad take a look at the Sapphire Radeon X1950 GT graphics card. At the heart of the Radeon X1950 GT is the same RV570 GPU used in the Radeon X1950 Pro. If you recall, RV570 is built on TSMC's 80-nm manufacturing process and contains 36 pixel shaders, 8 vertex shaders, 12 TMUs and 12 ROPs. Keeping the graphics core fed with data are eight 32-bit memory controllers, for a 256-bit memory interface. All of this carries over unchanged in the Radeon X1950 GT, none of the shaders are deactivated. Instead AMD has lowered the clock speeds of the graphics core and memory: whereas the X1950 Pro ran at 575MHz, the Radeon X1950 GT runs at an even 500MHz. The speed of the board's memory is also reduced, running at 600MHz (versus 690MHz on the Radeon X1950 Pro).

Sure, the X1950 GT isn't quite as fast as the original Radeon X1900 GT, but this can easily be made up with a little bit of overclocking of the graphics core. We hit 628MHz with our card, and at that speed the Sapphire X1950 GT board outpaced the X1900 GT and the Radeon X1950 Pro (in the case of Company of Heroes). If Sapphire can get the memory overclocking issues resolved, we have no doubt that this board could perform as well as, if not better than the Radeon X1950 Pro, at a slightly lower price. This would make the card an instant contender for our Bull's Eye Award.

The only downside is the excessive amount of noise this card generates. Sapphire has neglected to provide a variable speed fan like the one used on the Radeon X1950 Pro. In fact, even the cheaper Radeon X1650 XT has a variable speed fan. As a result, Sapphire's X1950 GT card runs incredibly loud, louder than any card we've tested in the past 18 months, including the Radeon X1900 XTX and X1800 XT, which developed a reputation for running notoriously loud. This is an issue that Sapphire needs to address ASAP as the card runs too noisy as it stands today.