MSI RX1950 Pro
ATI Radeon X1950 Pro, 256 MB GDDR3Core Clock : 573 MHz
Memory Clock : 681 MHz (1362 MHz GDDR3)
Overall Score: 82 points
As you can see, the MSI RX1950 Pro uses a dual slot cooling solution. So be prepare to empty one or two slots near the PCIe x16 slot with this card - one slot will be taken by the cooling solution and another for air flow purposes. We honestly wish MSI had come up with a better solution. Honestly, if you're going to go dual slot cooling, you expect the memory to be cooled as well - not so as you can see from the picture. To be fair, the memory chips directly under the fan do get cooled and the GDDR3 memory used don't warm up after hours of operation.
When you pick up the card, you'll definitely notice the weight. We're pretty sure the heat sink uses a copper base, with aluminum fans spread out to better dissipate heat. The extra heat pipe ala GeForce 7 series coolers also help transfer heat from the hottest part of the base to the fins. We wish the fan was closer to the chip than it is - the heat sink's fan housing interfered with SATA cables installation on our Gigabyte P965-DS3P when the card is placed in the second x16 PCIe slot.
Now, the bundle. Depending on where you live, you'll get the usual accessories and two full games - Heroes of Might and Magic V plus xxxxx . We say depending on where you live - the sample we received do not include any game, useful GPU related utilities or even DVD playback software. Talk about cost savings. At the very least, you should be able to find the usual accessories inside - two DVI to analog dongle for those still using analog monitors, an HDTV cable, a composite / S-Video cable and an extender cable. Nice of MSI - you can use the extender with both the HDTV cable or the composite / S-Video cable. The 4 pin 12v ATX to 6 pin ATX power cable / converter to provide extra power to your RX1950 Pro is also included.
What's missing is the internal Crossfire bridge cable. We mentioned our disappointment over this to the local MSI PR representative. It seems that by default, MSI offer the internal Crossfire bridge cable as optional accessories (you need two to be able to use Crossfire). So, users interested in getting two MSI RX1950 Pro T2D256E will have to shelf out additional funds to get the Crossfire internal bridges. Unfortunately, we were unable to confirm this to MSI's Taiwan office - so the policy might be different depending on where you live.
OK, enough about that. Let's see how the card do after 15 minutes of Quake 4 action. We used Unwinder's RivaTuner tool to access hardware monitoring functions of this card - all OVERDRIVE enabled cards feature built in hardware monitoring. Below is the screen dump from RivaTuner 2.0 (final).
68° Celsius full load, quickly dropping 12° Celsius lower once we returned to the desktop. Very nice indeed. Notice that it's about 16° Celsius higher at full load and just 6° Celsius higher at idle than ambient temperatures. Fan speeds stayed constant all through the test. If only there were some way to control fan speed, we can see just how effective this cooler is under different fan settings (quiet or full speed). Remember, MSI didn't include any GPU related utility (to control fan settings, set core and memory clock and monitor temperatures) with this card.
Overall, we're not overly impressed with MSI's offering. We actually expect better - the use of a dual slot cooling solution.is forgivable, but the lack of cooling for the memory chips is not. The lack of games may not be important for some, but not bundling the Crossfire internal bridge cable is a big mistake in our opinion. Though you can still buy the bridges from the local distributor / representative, wouldn't it be much easier to pick cards bundling the internal bridge? We think so.
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