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LOSTCIRCUITS | ||
| Sapphire RADEON X1950 Pro 512 MB AGP The Proof is in the Frame Buffer | ||
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Sample supplied by Sapphire (Review by MS, Jan 1, 2007) |
Test Configurations
AGP systems are getting pretty rare, in fact, there is hardly a chance to find new motherboards anywhere except for some obsolete parts growing fungus due to extended shelf life; even in our labs we were hard pressed to find anything that could even accommodate an AGP card. In the end we decided to really push it and settled for a system powered by Intel's 855 chipset and none other than a 1.7 GHz Pentium M. Well, we cheated and overclocked this little gem to 2.26 GHz. To top it off, as a proof of concept, we hooked everything up to a CleverPower SPS300 Silent power supply (300 W) with a whopping 18A supplied on the 12V rail. It doesn't get much more obsolete than that but at least that system does not trip the circuit breaker. Ironically, the i855 chipset only supports AGP x4 so the question is whether this system will be able to stand up to any of the more modern contenders. Needless to say that we will be comparing apples and oranges but to be honest, that is exactly the situation in which an upgrade decision will have to be made. For the most part, we'll stick to a comparison between the 256 MB PCIe version of our earlier review and to just looking at different resolutions and filter settings in some of the most common games.
| AGP Platform | SLI Platform | Sapphire X1950 Pro PCIe Platform |
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SP2 DX9c DotNet 2.0 all latest drivers as available at the time of testing. | ||
Two Molex connectors can supply 10A at 12V for a combined 120W to the card.
Benchmark Overview
We used the following benchmarks:
It is quite obvious that we have a complete hodgepodge of system configurations here that are by no means comparable. On the other hand, the goal here is not to show that one card is faster than the other but rather a demonstration of what $200 and change can buy at high resolutions with all eye candy turned On. We will do a limited comparison between the AGP (512 MB) version and the PCIe (256 MB) version running on a much faster system, and for those who really need a comparison to other cards, we'll have a few runs of X3 and Quake4. Otherwise, we are rather concentrating on the idiosyncrasies of the X1950 Pro AGP under all possible combinations of resolutions and filtering to show what this card can actually do and where the sweet spots are.
In case of FarCry we used HardwareOC's benchmarking tool with the Pier, Volcano and River levels. There was no quantitative difference between the results after setting AA and AF in the Benchmark tool or within the Catalyst Control Center. The same happened in our own recorded Pier benchmark. In Quake4, on the other hand, setting the filter levels in the HWOC tool was essentially without effect whereas manual setting of AA and AF in the Catalyst Control Center did cause the expected performance derating.
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