Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro AGP

In our review of the PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP, we speculated that ATI didn’t provide a reference board design for the GPU, leaving the board design up to their individual board partners instead. Judging by the differences between the Sapphire and PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP cards, this theory definitely appears correct, as the two boards share more differences than similarities to each other, despite the fact that they’re both based on the exact same GPU.


For starters, Sapphire uses a PCB that’s much larger than any we’ve seen on a graphics card in this class before. The PCB Sapphire uses is considerably taller than anything we’ve seen in recent memory, excluding perhaps the GeForce 7900 GX2. In fact it reminds us of some of the debug cards we’ve come across over the years. Fortunately we don’t think this should be an issue, as the PCB is still shorter than many of the aftermarket CPU coolers we use around here from the likes of Zalman, Thermaltake, Scythe, and others. For reference purposes though we did measure the card at just over 5” tall when housed inside the AGP slot. Also as you can see, Sapphire continues to employ a blue PCB on their cards, both X1950 Pro boards we’re reviewing here today have blue PCBs.

The other key difference between Sapphire’s X1950 Pro that you’ll immediately notice are the dual Molex power connectors on the back of the graphics card. With the PCIe version of the X1950 Pro requiring an external power connection, it’s no surprise to see that the AGP variant of the board needs an external power source also, but we were a little surprised to see dual Molex connectors. If you recall, NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 Ultra required dual Molex connectors also.


If you forget to plug in one of the Molex connectors, or one of them comes loose, the card won’t operate – during POST the system fails to get a video signal. Like the GeForce 6800 Ultra, each Molex connector needs its own dedicated power connection – in other words, if you run one power cable with two power connections into the card it won’t operate. You need to run two separate, distinct power cables to the card in order for it to function properly.

With this in mind, we were a little disappointed to see that Sapphire only includes one power adapter cable with their Radeon X1950 Pro AGP card. Back in the GeForce 6800 Ultra days, NVIDIA’s board partners were very good about including two power adapters. Fortunately, you can piggyback one or both of the card’s power connections on other devices, say for instance a hard drive(s) and/or optical drive(s); just make sure you aren’t using the same physical power cable to power both of the graphics card’s Molex connectors and you’ll be okay. Of course, a wiser move on Sapphire’s part may have been to just use the same 6-pin power connector Sapphire uses for their PCIe boards, that’s the solution PowerColor has implemented on their X1950 Pro card and we haven’t noticed any problems with it.

The other feature that stands out on Sapphire’s card is their use of 512MB of GDDR3 memory. Sapphire is the first card manufacturer to integrate 512MB of memory on a Radeon X1950 Pro AGP, in fact, most PCIe-based X1950 Pro cards only ship with 256MB of memory. We’ll be curious to see if the larger frame buffer provided by the extra memory yields any performance gains for the 512MB Sapphire board. In theory the extra memory could come in handy under higher resolutions, particularly once AA is applied. As a result, this could make the Sapphire X1950 Pro AGP board a little more future-proof than other X1950 Pro cards, at least on paper.

The rest of the board is pretty standard fare, at least among Radeon X1950 Pro cards. The board ships with two dual-link DVI connections and supports HDCP out-of-the-box, so you can watch HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies at full 1080p resolution with no compromises (provided you have an HDCP compliant monitor), and the board ships at the standard X1950 Pro clock speeds of 580MHz core/700MHz memory. For cooling the GPU and memory modules, Sapphire uses the standard ATI heatsink/fan used for the Radeon X1950 Pro PCIe.


Like the X1950 Pro Ultimate, Sapphire’s X1950 Pro AGP lacks support for VIVO. This may or may not be a big issue, depending on whether or not you need this feature.

Inside the box you’ll find the driver CD, two DVI adapters, a power adapter, HDTV cable, and S-Video and composite video cables. The card ships without a game bundle to save costs.