Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro

America sucks, all the X1950 Pros are $100 over priced.
The MSRP is $199USD, ppl price it for $299USD.

 

$300 is still only a little more then we're paying over here, and to be honest, it's nice to see thee UK consumers not getting screwed on price compared with the states for once.

I assure you, normally you guys are getting far better deals then we are.

Anyhoo, quite tempted by this card as a stop-gap. People talk about DX10 as if it's out tomorrow but I'm not so sure people are going to be heavily adopting DX10 cards so soon, so it seems like not a bad idea.

I guess the real connundrum isn't "Is it worth getting this before DX10 arrives?" but rather "Are there are actually any games out right now that make it worth getting a decent graphics card?".

 

even with dx10 being a white elephant for the time being i'd still say wait and at least see what the G80 is like before buying a card right now. because even if you just look at it as a high end DX9 card, 128 unified shaders is a bloody hell of a lot

 

Tim, can you do me a favour and take a look at the S-video port on it and tell me if it matches the diagram near the middle of the page here please? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svideo

I got a 6800GS around the turn of this year and annoyingly, my S-video connector won't fit into it(It's got no hole for the litte block bit at the bottom of the diagram there). Don't wanna buy yet another graphics card that won't let me play vids on my telebox.

 

i noticed an entry on overclockersuk...
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/X1950_Series.html

GeCube ATI Radeon X1950 Pro FZ SuperCooled TURBO SILENT TEC/Heatpipe 512MB GDDR3 VIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail

sounds cool pelter cooled and 512mb.

they state " it Featuring two large silent 80mm fans providing good airflow along with TEC/Peltier to further help remove heat from the GPU which is then quickly cooled by the heatpipes. This cooling method considerably drops temperatures and along with the RV570 core is very easily overclocked to some amazing speeds, as high as 700MHz " " with ultra fast 1.2ns memory this card is capable of hitting some high speeds for those who wish to overclock " " However in testing when these cards have been overclocked to 680MHz core and 1620MHz memory they can equal the performance of an X1950 XTX "

well im speechless and for under £190

 

I think the final statement in that is a bit sensationalist, and I don't think it's true. You can run the theoretical numbers and realise that it doesn't come close.

Radeon X1950XTX has 48ps/8vs/16ROPs @ 650MHz + a 2GHz memory clock
GeCube's Radeon X1950 Pro has 36ps/8vs/12ROPs @ 680MHz + a 1.62GHz memory clock

Radeon X1950XTX is going to win any benchmark at high resolution with anti-aliasing. It's also going to win anything that's fill rate limited or shader limited too, since Radeon X1950XTX has 33% more pixel shaders and ROPs (pixel output engines) than you'll find on Radeon X1950 Pro.

I still think GeCube's product is a pretty interesting one nonetheless. Welcome to the forums.

 

............................i too thought that

[/QUOTE]Radeon X1950XTX has 48ps/8vs/16ROPs @ 650MHz + a 2GHz memory clock
GeCube's Radeon X1950 Pro has 36ps/8vs/12ROPs @ 680MHz + a 1.62GHz memory clock

I still think GeCube's product is a pretty interesting one nonetheless.[/QUOTE]

......also i agree.. going to be good seeing how it fairs even so in benchmarks..maybe it will have better potential than the toxic range?


and thankyou, its an honour to be here..always good to find new sources of info...

p.s tim if given the choice and a budget of around £300-350 what crossfire solution would you choose?? i was hoping for 2 of those gecubes
but may look for 2 1900xt cheap on ebay ..others keep saying wait for r600 i think its called but i have been down a machine fore over 4 weeks and getting withdrawls got a new Dfi cfx3200 and need some action

oh i dont play above 1280x res ...thats my max tft res just so you know so none of this 19** res stuff for me i wish ...maybe when i win the lottery.

note: last card was a gainward bliss 7800gs+ but sold that on upgrade..

anyways nice being here

 

Dissapointing

Well, I bought two of these to work in Crossfire together. While I was at it I bought a new motherboard, and another gig of ram, bringing me up to:

1 x AMD Athlon 64 (ADA3800BVBOX) X2 3800+ Socket 939 Dual Core 2.0ghz 512Kb and 512Kb Cache
1 x Abit AT8 32X ATI® CrossFire™ Xpress 3200 + ULI1575 chipset for AMD Athlon 64X2/ 64FX/ 64/ for Skt 939 Sempron Processors
2 x Sapphire X1950Pro 256MB 256bit GDDR3 Dual DVI TVO PCI-E
2 x CRUCIAL 1GB DDR PC3200 400MHz 184-PIN UNBUFF 128MX64 Memory Modules

While I'm aware this isn't an "uber" gaming rig, it doesn't strike me as being terrible either, but of course, correct me if I'm wrong.

However, my 3DMark06 score was embarrassing (6914), I'm not noticing any real eye-candy, jaw-dropping scenes in Oblivion, HL2 or Quake 4, and the current Catalyst drivers don't appear to support the card!

The games I play play well, but I'm not noticing any significant difference from my old NVidia Geforce 6600 8xAGP.

Maybe it's just me, maybe I've done something wrong, or maybe the rest of my machine is dragging the cards down.

If anyone else has had a better experience with these cards, please let me know!

 

what res are you runnign at. and what AA settings have you got set for you games. because a system like that you want to be running at very high res to make use of the 2 cards. and if not. run some serious AA

 

I play at 1280x1024 (as high as my LCD's will go), and put the game settings up as far as they will go, which usually includes high AA, etc.

 

well i would say a crossfire setup at that res is a bit of a waste. the gfx dont get to strech there legs at all. at least you should never see the frames go into single figures