Ballistics Report

Pros

X1950 Pro core: On paper there really aren’t any GPUs in the AGP space that can match the specs of the X1950 Pro’s RV570 GPU. It’s got a whopping 36 pixel shaders, that’s over twice as many shaders as any previous AGP-based GPU. In addition, the board has eight vertex shaders and it has a memory bandwidth advantage of nearly 6GB/sec over the GeForce 7800 GS AGP.

In the PCIe world, this card was meant to compete with the GeForce 7900 GS, a role which it excels in, so in its new AGP skin the X1950 Pro is easily the fastest GPU for the AGP interface right now.

Besides the performance, the X1950 Pro GPU also supports features like HDR+AA, Avivo, and 10-bit display output.

Cooling: Rather than sticking with ATI’s reference cooling unit for their X1950 Pro AGP card, PowerColor has decided to employ Arctic Cooling’s Accelero 2 cooler. The Accelero 2 cooler is a very powerful cooling unit, and it does a great job of keeping the X1950 Pro’s RV570 GPU cool, after all, it was designed to cool much hotter GPU’s like the X1900 XTX’s 48-shader R580 GPU.

The real beauty of the cooler is how quietly it runs: from a distance of six feet you can hardly hear the card! If you’re an enthusiast who cares about cooling, the fact that the PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP comes standard with the Acclero 2 should definitely appeal to you.

Performance: With ATI’s X1950 Pro at its core, the PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP is the fastest AGP card we’ve tested. Of course, keep in mind that it runs at the stock X1950 Pro clocks, so it’s possible that another board manufacturer may come along with a faster card at some point, but for right now, this board is just as fast as the other AGP cards that have been announced to date, with the obvious exception that this card includes the Accelero 2 cooling.

Price: PowerColor tells us their X1950 Pro AGP will carry an MSRP of just $209! That’s only $10 more than the official MSRP for the PCIe X1950 Pro. This is a really sweet deal considering that this board ships with the Accelero 2 cooler.

The only other X1950 Pro card on the market at the moment here in the USA is from Sapphire and it currently sells for about $250 online. The Sapphire card has twice the memory at 512MB, but our testing in the past has shown that mainstream cards like the X1950 Pro don’t really take advantage of the extra memory.

In any case, if street prices on the PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP stick in the sub-$220 range, it could be a huge hit among AGP gamers and hardware enthusiasts.

Connectivity: PowerColor’s X1950 Pro is HDCP-ready and supports two dual-link DVI connectors along with HDTV and S-Video output. These are all features

Cons

AGP interface: Technically the AGP interface is dead, but obviously it’s still delivering solid performance in today’s games. While we did see a slight advantage in favor of the PCIe-based X1950 Pro card in our benchmarks, keep in mind that the PCIe card was running on a high-end nForce 590 motherboard with DDR2-800 memory. The AGP-based PowerColor X1950 Pro card was using NVIDIA’s older nForce3 chipset and relied on slower DDR400 RAM.

Dual-slot: Keep in mind that the Accelero 2 is a dual-slot cooler, so you’ll have to be willing to give up the PCI slot directly adjacent to your AGP slot in order for the card to fit. Most enthusiasts leave this slot open anyway for improved airflow, so we don’t think this is a major deal.

Availability: Unfortunately, you won’t be able to get your hands on a PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP until early January. Apparently distributors are currently placing their orders and PowerColor is preparing shipments for our shores now. Our review board was couriered over directly from Taiwan, which is how we were able to get a sneak peek at the final card a little early.