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Although PowerColor has become synonymous with video cards and is a dominant presence in Europe and Asia, the name has yet to take a strong foothold here in North America. While PowerColor hasn't meandered into video card obscurity like some other manufacturers, say with the likes of Abit or Gigabyte (almost exclusively producing motherboards now), they aren't as ubiquitous as say, XFX and BFG have become for the NVIDIA side here. Instead (or perhaps by choice) PowerColor has opted for being known as the affordable video card manufacturer. To stretch that premise a little thinner, they have also been known in the past to release the occasional must-have value card for its cost to performance ratio. If I am to remember correctly, back in the day when the Radeon 98xx series was king PowerColor had developed quite a bit of solid credibility with that particular GPU.



PowerColor has definitely been keeping above the simple subsistence level as they've released a new video card for every new Radeon in ATI' graphics processor series. Now, it seems worthwhile to determine whether or not PowerColor has been flying under the radar with their cards, quietly out performing the other brands so to speak.


The PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 is one of their newest products and it comes out on the near the eve of the ATI R600 release. Mere months away from the rumored R600 GPU launch, PowerColor decided to target a different market with their new card. Staying decidedly with Radeons through the years, PowerColors only real radical change with this card is that it comes with a silent cooling system (passive heatsink/heatpipe design). So it's nice to see a change of pace for PowerColor, who are pushing for silence and performance with the X1950.

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