If you are looking for a high performance card at a reasonable price, that is able to cope with all of the latest generation games, then the PowerColor X1900 GT is one card you should consider.

The card's performance was satisfactory in all the tested games, producing high framerates even at high resolutions with AA and AF enabled. In Half Life 2, F.E.A.R and NFS MW, the card performed more or less like the XFX 7800 GTX, which is an nVidia high-end and high priced card. In Ground Control 2 and Quake 4 with AA and AF, the card was just behind the XFX. These performances were confirmed with the 3D Mark06, 03, 01, Codecreatures and Aquamark 3 benchmarks, excepting 3D Mark05, which placed the card above the ASUS N7800 GTX TOP.

Overclocking capabilities are average. Leaving the stock GPU cooler in place, we managed to overclock the core from 574MHz to 600MHz and the memory from 594MHz to 716MHz, while only gaining a 1-5 fps boost in games. The stock cooler is also not designed for heavy overclocking, and temperature rose to 84°C, and 88°C when we set the core to 620MHz and memory to 720MHz. The clock speeds are close to those of an X1900XT card. We then changed the stock cooler with a VCool VC3600 and managed to achieve clock speeds of 625/720 while keeping temperatures respectable.

The retail package from PowerColor is complete, and includes all required cables, drivers and DVD software. However, no games are included.

At the time of this review, the PowerColor was priced at US $299.99 from newegg.com, quite reasonable for such a high performance card.

Pros:
- High performance
- Low price
- DVD Software

Cons:
- Average cooling system
- No bundled games

Performance:
Overclocking:
Bundle:
Value for money: