Sapphire
X1950 Pro 512Mb AGP
The industries shift to
the PCI-Express platform left many enthusiasts
lacking the ability to update their graphics card.
Because of that they were forced to either change
their motherboard (often requiring they replace
the CPU as well) or to keep their current hardware
and hope that some day a quality AGP card would
come out. Those who have been unable to afford
the upgrade to PCIe have had very slim pickings
this year, however Sapphire have announced the
AGP version of one of the best cards of 2006 –
the X1950Pro.
As
you can see in the picture above the drivers recognize
the card as a regular X1950 Pro, the only difference
being the bus type. The rest of the CCC looks
exactly the same as it does on the PowerColor
X1950 Pro we used to compare the card with. The
board even supports the ATI Overdrive feature.
The clocks are the same as the PCI-E version from
Sapphire – 580Mhz on the GPU and 700Mhz
for the memory. The card we reviewed sported 512
Mb of GDDR3 memory which is quickly becoming the
new standard. It goes without saying that the
AGP card doesn't support Crossfire.
The
card looks almost identical to it's PCI-E counterpart,
the only major difference being the two molex
connectors instead of the single PCI-E power connector
and the AGP pins at the bottom. The cooler uses
only a single slot and doesn't look all that efficient.
It's performance is analyzed further on in the
review, but the initial impression was far from
good.
The
output connectors on the card are standard fare,
that being two dual-DVI connectors and a HD capable
TV-out plug. As expected for an X1K series card
it supports AVIVO which enables it to accelerate
video decoding.
|
The
package is smaller than usual and my first
thought was that it only contained the
card and the driver CD. After opening
it I was (thankfully) proven wrong as
all the classic cables are provided together
with a molex cable that should come in
handy in case you are running out of free
molex connectors. The software CD that
comes with the card contains only the
drivers and all the software needed to
get them set up (.net framework for example).
|
