It may appear to be playing second fiddle to the X1900 XTX, but the XT is much more than it seems. It only lacks 25MHz compared to the XTX’s 650MHz core clock, and memory is 725MHz rather than 775MHz, but otherwise the two cards are identical. That means eight shaders, 48 pixel pipelines and a whopping 512MB of GDDR3 RAM.

We ran Far Cry at 1600 x 1200 and were rewarded with a great average of 50fps, while Call of Duty 2 resulted in a similarly impressive result of 39fps. This makes it less than 3fps slower than the XTX in both tests. Considering the $80 price premium for the XTX’s tiny improvement, the XT is the better buy, especially as you can only take advantage of CrossFire with the XT version.

The double-height heatsink and fan isn’t annoyingly noisy and has the advantage over others in that it blows all its hot air out of the back of the case rather than towards other components inside your PC. If it’s too distracting, you could quieten it with a Zalman VF900-CU for an extra $48 from www.pc.net.au (rated at under 20dBA), but if you can live with the noise it does a good job, particularly as the heatsink cools the memory modules as well.

The remaining features are the same on both cards: two dual-link DVI ports and a TV-out socket supporting S-Video, composite and component video. The cables are all supplied, including a nine-pin composite/S-Video VIVO adapter. We love the two-from-four choice of games bundle too (see the X1800 GTO review for titles).

The X1900 XT can’t claim to offer the greatest value for money, but new top-end cards never do — their job is to provide top performance and little else. If value is a priority, the 7900 GT is a better but less-powerful choice; it’s significantly cheaper at $455 and will happily play games at 1280 x 1024.

But if power is your priority, the X1900 XT is the outstanding option. The XTX doesn’t offer enough of an improvement to warrant the extra cost, while the GeForce 7900 GTX is almost $100 more and proved slower than the X1900s.