When I first installed the Sapphire X1950 GT I was surprised by its super loud annoying fan noise. After talking to Sapphire about this they sent me a new BIOS. With this the card is a lot quieter and much more fun to use.
Its performance is of course not comparable to super high-end cards, but for a price of $140 it offers one of the best price/performance ratios in the midrange segment. If you previously thought about getting an X1600, the X1950 GT is definitely the better deal. The same applies to similar offerings from NVIDIA.
With about 20% overclocking headroom, this card has some extra potential left in it if you are willing to go the overclocking route. Then its performance can surpass the more expensive X1900 GT and get close to the X1950 Pro. However, with only 256 MB of video memory it may be too slow if you are looking at high-resolutions of 1280x1024 and beyond.