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GeCube Radeon X1950XT AGP |
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Written by Nebojsa Todorovic
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Monday, 09 April 2007 |
AGP is slowly being forgotten. This is a sentence that we hear often, but AGP is still here. Is it the matter of ATI or NVIDIA, that is not relevant, until from time to time one of those subjects gives impulse of life to AGP. Accelerated Graphic Port survives like this for year and a half, and we constantly keep saying goodbye. Realistically, those impulses are less often, and with every month we are probably closer to the moment comes when that line will level up and eventually remove AGP from its life support machine.
This time on our test we have the highest top of ATI offer, Radeon X1950XT 256MB card. Signed by GeCube, this card is impressive at first sight. On big printing plate there is R580 chip in 90-nanometric manufacturing process, with its 48 pixel pipelines. R580 in this case is cooled by a big cooler with two ventilators on it. It is GeCube’s TEC (Thermo ElectriC) cooled with four heat pipes completely made of aluminum. The cooling is based on Peltier technique. In the packet with a card, there is a HDTV cable attached with all the necessary equipment.
Product | GeCube X1950XT AGP | Core | R580+ | Man. Technology | 90nm | Freq (GPU / MEM) | 650 / 1400MHz | Memory / Bus | 256MB DDR3 / 256bit | PS | 48 | VS | 8 | TMU | 16 |
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The cooling is quiet while working with a smaller number of rotations, when the card works in 2D mode, while you can sense the speeding in 3D mode when the noise of the machine jumps from 20 dB to 28 dB. The card has 256MB GDDR3 (256-bit bus) memory with access time of 1.4ns. Factory rates are 650 MHz for core and 1400MHz for memory. The overclock abilities are quite satisfying, and they are 710 MHz for core and 1700MHz for memory. That is fairly satisfying acceleration, and graphics card remains cool due to its advanced cooler.
When it comes to realistic work this card is exceptionally fast. Even more, this product with a reason carries the title of the fastest AGP card. The only problem is a hardware that will follow it up to its full speed. With resolution set at 1024x768 we experienced jamming since the rest of our test machine was bottleneck. That was shown from results with small difference after resolution change - the test result was very similar in a 1024x768 resolution to a 1280x1024 resolution. Anyway, strongest graphic card for PCI Express, are usually followed by platform with dual-core processor. That custom is unfortunately impossible to achieve with an AGP card.
1024x768 (4xAA, 8xAF) | GeCube X1950XT AGP | Freq (GPU\MEM) | 650MHz / 1400MHz | 3DMark05 | 6885 | 3DMark06 (SM2.0 / SM3.0) | 1957 / 2207 | DOOM III (MaxQ) | 79,1 | FEAR (MaxQ) | 56 | CoD2 (MaxQ) | 59,3 | Prey (MaxQ) | 53,7 |
Testbed: Athlon64 2800+ Newcastle, 2x512MB DDR400,
MSI K8N Neo nForce3, Catalyst 7.3 |
So this card you should be considering only in case that the rest of your configuration is fairly strong. Contrary, a better investment will be to switch to a PCI platform by purchasing Radeon X1950PRO card. Rear specimens for AGP are unrealistically expensive, therefore their value is questionable. Essentially, all games will work smoothly, but it will be a great expense for you. Although this is the fastest graphic card for AGP in the moment, the question is if the power of the card can be used in a proper manner. You don't need faster than this, because the next AGP card, if any faster, could not be fully used. |
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