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PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro AGP Review December 22, 2006 |
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Summary: Is PCI Express really faster than AGP? That's one of the questions we set out to answer in today's review of the PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP. With its Arctic Cooling Accelero 2 cooler it runs nearly silently and its RV570 GPU certainly performs well, but how well does it stack up to other AGP cards like the GeForce 6800 Ultra and GeForce 7800 GS AGP, as well as the Radeon X850 XT PE AGP? Find out in today's review!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 16 ) |
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It has been a pretty slow year for gamers with AGP systems. While the majority of the graphics market has continued to move at a frenetic pace this year, the rate of innovation on the AGP front has been significantly slower: while PCIe graphics performance has easily doubled in the past 12 months thanks to the recent introduction of the GeForce 8800, AGP graphics performance is at best, 20-25% faster than the GeForce 6800 Ultra and Radeon X850 XT PE cards of a few years ago. (And often times it’s much closer than that in many benchmarks.) Quite frankly, for the most part ATI and NVIDIA have left AGP users out in the cold.
Finally, if all that wasn’t enough, the graphics core of the GeForce 7800 GS AGP runs 55MHz slower than the GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB at 375MHz. That’s also 25MHz slower than the GeForce 7800 GT, and just 25MHz higher than the GeForce 6800 GT.
As a result of all these changes, the GeForce 7800 GS AGP’s basic configuration shared more in common with the GeForce 6800 line than it did the GeForce 7800. This seemed to particularly upset AGP enthusiasts who already owned 6800 Ultra and GT cards. These users were hoping for an AGP upgrade that would deliver a substantial improvement over their current cards. Instead the GeForce 7800 GS AGP was tailored more for gamers who were coming from early DX9 cards like the Radeon 9x00 and GeForce FX series, as well as DirectX 8 and integrated graphics solutions.
Fortunately we can report that this isn’t the case for ATI’s Radeon X1950 Pro AGP: this card isn’t a cut down or detuned version of the PCI Express variant of the X1950 Pro. Feature-for-feature, nothing’s been changed. What does that equate to on paper? In case you aren’t familiar with the specs of the Radeon X1950 Pro, let’s provide a quick refresher.
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RV570 GPU
The Radeon X1950 Pro is based on ATI’s 80-nm RV570 GPU. RV570 sports 36 pixel shaders and eight vertex shaders, and runs at 575MHz core/690MHz memory. In PCIe form, the card also ships with integrated CrossFire support that’s built in to the GPU itself; ATI’s CrossFire master cards are no longer necessary. In our Radeon X1950 Pro Performance Preview article we found that the PCIe X1950 Pro was not only capable of outrunning the GeForce 7900 GS, in benchmarks like F.E.A.R., Half-Life 2 Lost Coast, and Oblivion, the card could even outdo the GeForce 7900 GT!
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With the debut of the Radeon X1950 Pro AGP, all this performance is now coming to the AGP platform intact. Again, as we mentioned earlier, ATI’s reference specifications for the X1950 Pro AGP call for the exact same minimum clocks of 575MHz core/690MHz memory. Board partners are also free to make tweaks to their X1950 Pro AGP cards if they wish. PowerColor’s Radeon X1950 Pro AGP card is one such example of this…
| Board analysis | Page:: ( 2 / 16 ) |
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Awesome cooling
We don’t have an ATI reference X1950 Pro AGP card, so we don’t know how far PowerColor’s X1950 Pro AGP board deviates from the reference board design itself, but one feature we do know PowerColor has added that isn’t found on ATI’s reference board is its cooling: rather than stick with ATI’s stock cooling unit, PowerColor has elected to go with Arctic Cooling’s excellent Accelero 2 cooler.
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The Accelero 2 has proven popular among ATI enthusiasts looking for a cooler to effectively cool their Radeon X1800 and X1900 cards while also running nearly silently. It’s got six heatpipes for cooling and uses a mixture of copper and aluminum. For greater effectiveness, the 60mm fan is located offset of the graphics core and it relies on a ducted design, although unlike some of Arctic Cooling’s previous coolers, it doesn’t exhaust hot air outside your system’s case.
Because of its outstanding performance, the Arctic Cooling Accelero ended up taking home our Bull’s Eye Award for its outstanding performance and low price.
PowerColor’s X1950 Pro AGP card ships standard with this outstanding cooler out-of-the-box.
While you may not be able to see it in the pictures, the Accelero X2 is a tall heatsink/fan unit. It will eat up the slot directly adjacent to your graphics card, it’s definitely a dual-slot cooler, so you will have to keep this in mind if the slot next to your graphics card is currently occupied.
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At a hair over 9.5” in length, the card is also a little longer than most AGP cards. Here we should note though that the card isn’t any longer than its PCIe-based sibling, both cards share the exact same dimensions as they’re both based on the same PCB. In fact, if you look in the top left corner of the card you can see the cutouts for the two 12-bit CrossFire connectors. The power connector is also placed at the top right corner of the AGP board, whereas on PCIe X1950 Pro cards it’s located in the center. Interestingly enough, it’s a 6-pin PCIe power connector and not the standard Molex power connector you usually see on most AGP cards. Fortunately PowerColor includes a 6-pin power adapter inside the board’s packaging in case your system’s power supply isn’t equipped with a 6-pin connector.
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Flipping the card over, you’ll no doubt notice ATI’s Rialto bridge chip. This little wonder takes the PCI Express signals native to the X1950 Pro, and translates them for use over the AGP bus. In operation the chip does get hot to the touch, but apparently not hot enough to warrant the use of a heatsink. This is probably a good thing though as having a heatsink on the underside of the card could make it tough to install in some motherboards, particularly those with elaborate cooling on the North Bridge of the system chipset.
Rest of the features
In terms of clock speeds, PowerColor has elected to rely on ATI’s stock speeds of 575MHz core/690MHz memory for their X1950 Pro AGP card. The PowerColor website currently reads 600MHz core/700MHz memory, but we’ve confirmed with them that this is indeed a typo and that the board isn’t overclocked from the factory. In terms of connectivity, the board ships with dual DVI connectors and supports HDCP, so you can enjoy HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies in full resolution glory. It also supports S-Video and HDTV output.
Inside the card’s packaging you’ll find your typical mixture of cables and connectors. PowerColor includes a DVI adapter, component video cable for hooking the card up to an HDTV, S-Video cable, composite cable, and the aforementioned power cable. Here we would like to see PowerColor include a second DVI adapter, but in all honesty with the proliferation of DVI-based LCDs this is only a minor complaint. Also included in the card’s packaging is a driver CD and a DVD with various CyberLink software programs, including PowerDVD and a trial version PowerDVD Copy.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 3 / 16 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
MSI K8N Neo2 nForce3 Ultra motherboard
ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe nForce 590 SLI Motherboard
2GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4
ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB PCI Express
PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB AGP
PowerColor Radeon X850 XT PE AGP
Catalyst 6.12
GeForce 6800 Ultra
EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS AGP KO SuperClock
Driver version ForceWare 93.71
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP2
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Company of Heroes 1.3
Far Cry 1.33 (1.4 patch for ATI cards)
F.E.A.R. 1.08
Quake 4 1.2
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Battlefield 2142 1.10
Call of Duty 2 1.3
Notes
We still receive lots of emails asking us to compare the performance of PCI Express and AGP. If you recall when the PCI Express interface first debuted we saw no performance advantages from the new interface, despite its theoretical bandwidth advantage on paper. At the time we chalked it up to a lack of applications that could really take advantage of the added bandwidth PCI Express provides and left it at that. It has been awhile since we ran any comparative testing though so we decided to revisit the topic again for this article.
Ideally we would have compared the performance of the X1950 Pro on three different platforms: the Radeon X1950 Pro with DDR400 on both PCIe and AGP (via the nForce3 and nForce4 Ultra chipsets), and finally the X1950 Pro with DDR2 on the nForce 590 platform, which is the current high-end platform in use today. Unfortunately though, we didn’t have time to run tests with all three different platforms as well as the other graphics cards we wanted to test, there was only enough time for one additional platform besides the AGP testbed we used for testing. So we decided to go with the very high-end nForce 590 with DDR2-800. This way, those of you with AGP systems who are contemplating between just upgrading your graphics card, or replacing your entire system components can see the difference AMD’s latest gaming platform brings over your existing AGP platform, if any at all. We also used an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ to keep things reasonable. Obviously we could have used a faster CPU for these tests but we know that many of you like to buy the slower X2 and Opteron CPUs and then OC your processor to make up the difference.
We should also note that for the GeForce cards, we changed the default image quality setting from “quality” to “high quality” to reduce shimmering.
| 3DMark 06 | Page:: ( 4 / 16 ) |
3DMark 06 – Direct3D
| Battlefield 2142 | Page:: ( 5 / 16 ) |
Battlefield 2 – Direct3D
| Battlefield 2142 Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 6800 Ultra | 18 | 38 |
| GeForce 7800 GS AGP | 27 | 55 |
| Radeon X850 XT PE | 31 | 56 |
| PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP | 40 | 71 |
| Radeon X1950 Pro PCIe | 39 | 65 |
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| Quake 4 | Page:: ( 6 / 16 ) |
Quake 4 – OpenGL
| Pacific Fighters | Page:: ( 7 / 16 ) |
Pacific Fighters – OpenGL
| Pacific Fighters 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 6800 Ultra | 12 | 60 |
| GeForce 7800 GS AGP | 15 | 61 |
| Radeon X850 XT PE | 12 | 65 |
| PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP | 21 | 164 |
| Radeon X1950 Pro PCIe | 23 | 173 |
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| F.E.A.R. Performance | Page:: ( 8 / 16 ) |
F.E.A.R. – Direct3D
| F.E.A.R. Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 6800 Ultra | 18 | 69 |
| GeForce 7800 GS AGP | 25 | 86 |
| Radeon X850 XT PE | 21 | 78 |
| PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP | 26 | 114 |
| Radeon X1950 Pro PCIe | 28 | 115 |
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| Oblivion Mountains HDR | Page:: ( 9 / 16 ) |
Oblivion – Direct3D
| Oblivion HDR Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 6800 Ultra | 12 | 25 |
| GeForce 7800 GS AGP | 19 | 38 |
| Radeon X850 XT PE | - | - |
| PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP | 38 | 59 |
| Radeon X1950 Pro PCIe | 39 | 59 |
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| Oblivion Foliage HDR | Page:: ( 10 / 16 ) |
Oblivion – Direct3D
| Oblivion HDR Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 6800 Ultra | 8 | 12 |
| GeForce 7800 GS AGP | 12 | 16 |
| Radeon X850 XT PE | - | - |
| PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP | 30 | 36 |
| Radeon X1950 Pro PCIe | 30 | 36 |
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| Call of Duty 2 | Page:: ( 11 / 16 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| Far Cry HDR | Page:: ( 12 / 16 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Far Cry HDR 1280x1024 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 6800 Ultra | 14.5 | 30.9 |
| GeForce 7800 GS AGP | 33.9 | 64.3 |
| Radeon X850 XT PE | - | - |
| PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP | 42.2 | 72.9 |
| Radeon X1950 Pro PCIe | 46.4 | 73.3 |
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| Company of Heroes | Page:: ( 13 / 16 ) |
Company of Heroes – Direct3D
| Company of Heroes Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 6800 Ultra | 14.3 | 82 |
| GeForce 7800 GS AGP | 22.6 | 125 |
| Radeon X850 XT PE | 16 | 120 |
| PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP | 13 | 135.5 |
| Radeon X1950 Pro PCIe | 22.8 | 162.6 |
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| Overclocking | Page:: ( 14 / 16 ) |
Notes
Unfortunately the app that we normally use for overclocking was incompatible with the X1950 Pro AGP, so we had to settle for conventional overclocking with ATI’s Overdrive feature in Catalyst Control Center. The sliders max out at 621/796 and the PowerColor card was able to run at those speeds without breaking a sweat.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 15 / 16 ) |
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.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 16 / 16 ) |
FiringSquad says:
We realize there are many of you with AGP systems who are generally happy with the performance of your system, you just want a bit of a boost for games like Company of Heroes. Perhaps you’re waiting for DX10 games to actually ship before spending the big bucks on a high-end DX10 card. By then the second generation of DX10 hardware should be out anyway. Or perhaps you’re waiting until Vista is out and mature. There’s also plenty happening on the CPU front, with Core 2 getting a 1333MHz FSB and DDR3 next year, not to mention quad-core CPUs hitting mainstream prices and the debut of AMD’s highly anticipated Barcelona core.
The point is, there are plenty of reasons why many AGP users just don’t feel the urge to replace their entire system just yet, and would rather just upgrade the component that matters the most right now for gaming: the graphics card. Think of it as a midlife upgrade if you will.
The debate is, should you upgrade to a new card like the Radeon X1950 Pro AGP, or just junk the idea of a midlife upgrade and swap out your motherboard, graphics, and other components and make the move to PCI Express.
Hopefully this article shed a little light on what kind of performance you could expect from going down the midlife upgrade path (via the PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP), or for the all-out replacement with the PCI Express system.
As you just saw in our benchmarks, in many cases the AGP rig is quite a capable performer. In Quake 4 and Oblivion for instance, the difference in performance was nearly indistinguishable. Company of Heroes, and to a slightly lesser extent F.E.A.R. were the only applications where the PCI Express X1950 Pro card really pulled ahead of its AGP counterpart, with the PCIe board running up to 9% faster in CoH at 1600x1200 with 2xAA/8xAF.
In comparison to the other AGP cards, the Radeon X1950 Pro is clearly in a class of its own right now. With the exception of Quake 4 (where the GeForce 7800 GS quite handily outperformed the X1950 Pro), the X1950 Pro swept all of our benchmarks, sometimes delivering over 1.5 times the performance of the GeForce 7800 GS AGP. Unless you’re a heavy Quake player, the Radeon X1950 Pro is definitely the fastest GPU out there on the AGP platform. It really isn’t all that close either.
PowerColor’s X1950 Pro AGP card stands out due to its unique cooling. PowerColor has partnered with Arctic Cooling to deliver an X1950 Pro card that not only delivers terrific performance, it does so while generating very little noise thanks to its excellent cooler. The fact that the board retails for just $209 makes it an even better bargain: this will be without a doubt one of the best buys on the AGP market when it hits stores next month. Gamers on a budget will want it because of its relatively low price (it’s just $33 more expensive than a 7600 GT AGP based on today’s Pricegrabber pricing, and about $40 less than the Sapphire X1950 Pro AGP currently sells for), while enthusiasts will want it for its cooling.
Because of this, we’re a little worried that demand may outstrip supply initially, leading to artificially inflated street prices. It happens all the time after all. When street prices on PowerColor’s X1950 Pro AGP do settle down however, this is going to be the high-end AGP card to get. Its got a powerful GPU and one of the best coolers on the market already built-in, what more could you ask for if you’re an enthusiast or gamer who wants to upgrade to a higher-end card? With the exception of factory overclocking, we don’t think it can get much better than PowerColor’s X1950 Pro AGP card as it is now.