The X1950XTX and X1950 Crossfire Edition cards are designed to work together and despite my misgivings about the Crossfire cable, the combination of a X1950 Crossfire Edition + x1950XTX or X1900XTX card work together well in both Vista and XP, delivering outstanding performance. Unfortunately with the release of the 8800 series from NVIDIA this card has fallen on the wayside with a single 8800GTX offering better performance than two x1950XTX cards in many cases, and coming in a close second in the other cases
One of the strong points about ATI's X1950 Crossfire Edition is that Crossfire is supported in the drivers under Vista currently. The competition (SLI) does not support Vista on the 79xx series of video cards as of yet (that driver will likely come later this month). ATI has committed to monthly driver releases and has followed suit over the last two years without fail.
There are no games that require DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4 hardware at the moment, meaning that the choice of video card should be made on performance and image quality enhancements at the moment. That will change when ATI launches their R600 series and NVIDIA releases their mainstream and performance parts for the 99-199 price range. At the moment these features are just checkboxes.
The EAX1950 Crossfire Edition card is an excellent card that is unfortunately going to be overshadowed the couple of months by the ATI R600 cards and already is overtaken by the NVIDIA 8800 cards. As a reviewer I can't ignore the fact that there are cards in the very near timeframe or already available (8800GTS) that are better fits for the price point and support features that the X1950XTX does not. The card is available online for a price of $399. At this price point I have to give the nod to the 320MB version of the 8800GTS as it supports Shader Model 4.0, is $100 cheaper, and is available. The difference between the 640MB and 320MB version of the 8800GTS lies in amount of memory, so in most cases performance should be similar.
