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Radeon X1950 Pro Round Up

PCI Express x16 graphics cards
Chipset Radeon X1950 Pro 256 MB, 256 bit

If you're looking to buy a graphics card now, you might be tempted to wait for the next generation of cards. From experience, next generation mainstream cards should at least offer the same level of performance as current high end cards of today. Hopefully, that still holds true today. But sometimes you may not have a choice on the matter. So, your best bet is to get a card that still have enough power to run the latest games and don't break your wallet.

The Radeon X1950 Pro has proven to be quite the performer from a price / performance point of view. It offers about the same level of performance as the GeForce 7900GT / 7950GT, with prices nearer to those found in GeForce 7900GS. Performance in the latest games like Oblivion and Need for Speed: Carbon is good enough - frame rates are generally playable at 1024 x 768 with AA and AF, with most graphical quality settings set to maximum. The only card NVIDIA have right now that is a direct threat to the Radeon X1950 Pro is the GeForce 8800GTS 320 MB and that card is priced much higher - your mileage may vary depending on where you live or which online store you buy your card from.

Today, we're going to take a look at three Radeon X1950 Pro cards on the market. They are the Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro, MSI RX1950 Pro T2D256E and Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro. The Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro comes with a slightly higher memory clock and all three vendors have different approaches. Read on to find out which card we think has the best value for your gaming dollar. 

Overview

Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro

ATI Radeon X1950 Pro, 256 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 573 MHz
Memory Clock : 688 MHz (1376 MHz GDDR3)



Overall Score: 87 points

We've been using the Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro for some time now, so we've spent more time with this card than the other two cards. The cooler is similar to other Gigabyte made, Zalman cooled cards. The fan / heat sink  design, though a dual slot solution, doesn't take much space as other cooling solutions (like the MSI RX1950 Pro T2D256E or ATI's reference cooling solution). Placing it on the second x16 PCIe slot shouldn't interfere with any cables or connectors (at least not with our Gigabyte P965-DS3P). The addition of several copper fins and a copper base helps keep temperature lower than if an all aluminum heat sink was used.

Unfortunately, Gigabyte used a slightly different board design for their card and in the process fail to include hardware monitoring functions. From what we can tell, the fan does not scale with temperature nor does it spin up to full speed upon booting. Noise is minimal, only slightly noticeable over the noise from our Core 2 Duo processor stock cooling.. Although the Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro does not use any heat sink to cool its memory chips, the air flowing from the main fan is strong enough to keep them from getting warm or hot.

The card comes bundled with one game - Call of Juarez. While we don't mean any disrespect to the developers, we think Gigabyte should have chosen another game for the bundle. Why can't we get Supreme Commander that's bundled with those GeForce 8 and 7 instead? Oh well. In addition to a driver CD and manual, you'll also find an HDTV dongle, a 4 pin 12v ATX to 6 pin ATX cable / converter, two DVI to analog dongle and a flexible Crossfire internal bridge cable / connector.



A nice touch from Gigabyte is the inclusion of connector covers for both DVI ports and TV output port. Gigabyte didn't bundle any S-Video and composite cables, so be sure to pick them up somewhere else if you need them. You'll also have to find your own DVD playback software - Gigabyte doesn't include their usual Cyberlink's PowerDVD bundle with this card. In the driver CD, you'll find Gigabyte's own VTuner 3, which allows you to see and set core and memory clocks for the card. 


Overall, we think the Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro is one fine card. Most of the much needed bundles are present, though we still think there's room for improvement. It may have a dual slot cooling solution, but it doesn't take as much space as other cooling solutions and less noisy too. Too bad we can't see how effective it is since there are no hardware monitoring functions with this card. We thought about mounting the Zalman heat sink on the MSI RX1950 Pro to see just how effective the cooling solution is, but we decided that would actually be more of a cooling solution test than actual thermal management capabilities of the card. 

MSI RX1950 Pro

ATI Radeon X1950 Pro, 256 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 573 MHz
Memory Clock : 681 MHz (1362 MHz GDDR3)



Overall Score: 82 points

As you can see, the MSI RX1950 Pro uses a dual slot cooling solution. So be prepare to empty one or two slots near the PCIe x16 slot with this card - one slot will be taken by the cooling solution and another for air flow purposes. We honestly wish MSI had come up with a better solution. Honestly, if you're going to go dual slot cooling, you expect the memory to be cooled as well - not so as you can see from the picture. To be fair, the memory chips directly under the fan do get cooled and the GDDR3 memory used don't warm up after hours of operation.



When you pick up the card, you'll definitely notice the weight. We're pretty sure the heat sink uses a copper base, with aluminum fans spread out to better dissipate heat. The extra heat pipe ala GeForce 7 series coolers also help transfer heat from the hottest part of the base to the fins. We wish the fan was closer to the chip than it is - the heat sink's fan housing interfered with SATA cables installation on our Gigabyte P965-DS3P when the card is placed in the second x16 PCIe slot.

Now, the bundle. Depending on where you live, you'll get the usual accessories and two full games - Heroes of Might and Magic V plus xxxxx . We say depending on where you live - the sample we received do not include any game, useful GPU related utilities or even DVD playback software. Talk about cost savings. At the very least, you should be able to find the usual accessories inside - two DVI to analog dongle for those still using analog monitors, an HDTV cable, a composite / S-Video cable and an extender cable. Nice of MSI - you can use the extender with both the HDTV cable or the composite / S-Video cable. The 4 pin 12v ATX to 6 pin ATX power cable / converter to provide extra power to your RX1950 Pro is also included.

What's missing is the internal Crossfire bridge cable. We mentioned our disappointment over this to the local MSI PR representative. It seems that by default, MSI offer the internal Crossfire bridge cable as optional accessories (you need two to be able to use Crossfire). So, users interested in getting two MSI RX1950 Pro T2D256E will have to shelf out additional funds to get the Crossfire internal bridges. Unfortunately, we were unable to confirm this to MSI's Taiwan office - so the policy might be different depending on where you live.

OK, enough about that. Let's see how the card do after 15 minutes of Quake 4 action. We used Unwinder's RivaTuner tool to access hardware monitoring functions of this card - all OVERDRIVE enabled cards feature built in hardware monitoring. Below is the screen dump from RivaTuner 2.0 (final).



68° Celsius full load, quickly dropping 12° Celsius lower once we returned to the desktop. Very nice indeed. Notice that it's about 16° Celsius higher at full load and just 6° Celsius higher at idle than ambient temperatures. Fan speeds stayed constant all through the test. If only there were some way to control fan speed, we can see just how effective this cooler is under different fan settings (quiet or full speed). Remember, MSI didn't include any GPU related utility (to control fan settings, set core and memory clock and monitor temperatures) with this card.

Overall, we're not overly impressed with MSI's offering. We actually expect better  - the use of a dual slot cooling solution.is forgivable, but the lack of cooling for the memory chips is not. The lack of games may not be important for some, but not bundling the Crossfire internal bridge cable is a big mistake in our opinion. Though you can still buy the bridges from the local distributor / representative, wouldn't it be much easier to pick cards bundling the internal bridge? We think so.

Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro

ATI Radeon X1950 Pro, 256 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 580 MHz
Memory Clock : 702 MHz (1404 MHz GDDR3)



Overall Score: 85 points

If you're looking for a mainstream card that doesn't break your wallet, offer great performance in games and Windows Vista and still be able to fit in your HTPC, the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro just might be it. As you can see, the card uses the Radeon X1950 Pro reference single slot cooling solution. One nitpick that comes to mind with this solution is the spin up noise at boot time. Thankfully the noise is nothing like the Radeon X1950 XTX -  it's more like the startup noise of a GeForce 7800GT. Most of the heat sink is aluminum, but if you look closely  you can see the heat sink uses a large copper base about the size of the Radeon X1950 Pro chip . For those interested in details, the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro is based on the reference board design - it includes OVERDRIVE capabilities and thus, hardware monitoring. The memory chips are in contact with the heat sink, though not directly. Sapphire uses additional paddings to help heat transfer from the memory chips to the heat sink. We don't necessarily like this solution pretty much, but it should be able to help cool the chips if they do get that hot.

  

Open the box and you'll find the card, the must have accessories with CDs and manual inside. The Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro does not include a game bundle - you should be able to get the card at lower prices than competing products. Unfortunately, that also means no utilities and DVD playback software. The package is definitely targeted for the budget conscious gamer. One thing to note about the accessories - in addition to separately supplying composite and S-video cables, Sapphire also includes an S-video to composite converter. Although technically you can use both of them together if you're short on cables, we wouldn't recommend it. Completing the bundle are one ATX 12v to 6 pin ATX converter cable, two DVI to analog dongle and an HDTV cable.

One thing to note - our sample does not include a Crossfire internal bridge cable / connectors. We talked to our local Sapphire representative / distributor about this and he said that early versions of the card does not bundle the bridge. He promised us that the updated SKUs should include  the bridge as a standard accessory. Users who already have bought the card without any Crossfire internal bridge cable should talk to their Sapphire local representative or distributor about getting one.

OK. How does the single slot cooled Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro compare to dual slot cooled cards like the Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro and MSI RX1950 Pro T2D256E? We fired up Quake 4 for about 15 minutes with time demos after time demos to warm up the card. Here is a screen dump of RivaTuner afterwards.



76° Celsius at full load, dropping to 54° Celsius on the desktop. That;s about 25° Celsius higher at full load and just 9° Celsius higher at idle than ambient temperatures.This is hotter than the MSI RX1950 Pro T2D256E. Interesting to note, fan speeds do seem to scale with temperatures - we saw a 10 percent increase in fan duty cycle during full load temperatures. 25° Celsius higher than ambient temperature is a bit high, but  remember we're talking about single slot cooling here. We guess that's still acceptable.

What do we think about the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro? We think the budget conscious gamer would appreciate this offering from Sapphire, but we can't help but think you might actually get more for your buck (lower operating temperatures, software bundles) with other cards.

Performance

Since we only have one sample for each card, we didn't do any Crossfire testing. Well, actually we did, but that's another article. Right now we will only be looking at these cards as single card solutions. Testing was done with our new test setup, with our usual settings. We also limit testing to fewer games, ditching old games like Call of Duty, Homeworld 2, SW: KOTOR and Richard Burns Rally. For an idea on how a Radeon X1950 Pro perform with these games, read our article comparing the GeForce 7900GS and Radeon X1950 Pro here. Since all three cards relatively have the same core and memory clock, we don't expect much difference separating them from each other. If there are any differences, its very likely the benchmark is more sensitive to GPU memory bandwidth since the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro has a slight memory clock advantage.

We'd like to thank Tagan for supplying the additional power supply and Gigabyte for supplying both the Gigabyte P965-DS3P for this article.

Our test setup
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 socket LGA-775 (running at 7 x 400 MHz)
4 x 512 MB A-DATA 5-5-5-18 PC6400 DDR2-SDRAM
Gigabyte P965-DS3P Intel P965 motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
LiteOn 1673S DVD-RW
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 7.2 reference driver
Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility 8.1.0.1006
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

The graphs are pretty self explanatory, but in case you can't see the text, they're arranged in groups of three colors: green for minimum fps,  blue for average fps and red for maximum fps.  The first group of graphs are results taken with default settings - AA and AF is not enabled. The second group of results are results with 4x AA and 16x AF.

The results:

AMD still have a lot of work to do to iron out problems with F.E.A.R. Hopefully, things will be much better with the March release of Catalyst drivers. Generally we want to see minimum frame rates near or above 40 fps in FEAR Performance Test to enjoy the whole game without any stutter or lag. At this time, all three Radeon X1950 Pro can only offer that kind of experience without AA and AF. We don't see any noticeable frame rate differences between the three cards - differences range between 1 to 2 frames and that's more likely caused by normal variations between runs than the slight clock advantage the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro have.


In Quake 4, we see a slightly larger difference - 13 fps at default settings and 3 fps with AA and AF enabled at 1024 x 768. Still, looking at the nominal average fps we got here, that difference amounts to very negligible differences - 7 and 3 percent, respectively. We can still see the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro edging out the other two cards at 1280 x 1024 without AA and AF, but the advantage disappears once we enable AA and AF. What's interesting is that it seems memory bandwidth is a bottleneck for the Radeon X1950 Pro at 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 1024 without AA and AF. Remember, the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro' memory is clocked 30 to 40 MHz higher than the Gigabyte and MSI card.


We were slightly amazed at the performance difference between our old Athlon 64 3500+ and the Core 2 Duo E6300. With the Core 2 Duo overclocked to 2.8 GHz, the performance we're getting with this new setup is practically double the one we got with the old setup. That's good, because now we can see the Radeon X1950 Pro perform when system limitation isn't in play. Overall, all the Radeon X1950 Pro offer similar performance if not identical. The Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro may look faster than the other two cards at 1280 x 960, but that's very likely just normal variations between runs.  All three cards should be fast enough to play Serious Sam at 1280 x 960 with AA and AF or 1600 x 1200 without AA and AF with graphical settings set to their max values. HDR may still incur an additional performance penalty, so if you enable HDR with AA and AF, lower the resolution to 1024 x 768.


Except for the higher results at 1024 x 768 without AA and AF from the Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro, the graphs above are pretty similar to the others we've been seeing. The slightly higher memory clock of the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro is not enough to differentiate itself from the Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro and MSI RX1950 Pro T2D256E. Pushing 30 to 35 fps at 1024 x 768, with slightly higher settings than Ultra Quality, these three Radeon X1950 Pro have just enough power to offer playable frame rates on just about anywhere on the land of Tamriel.  Frame rates will dip slightly when you enter densely tree populated areas like the Great Forrest or Blackwood, but it should be around 25 fps. Not bad for a card that's selling around and sometimes under USD 200.


Probably the lightest game (graphically) in our benchmark, GTR 2 runs very smooth all the way up to 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF on all three cards. You'll undoubtedly notice the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro edging out the competition at 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200 without AA and AF. While you won't actually notice the difference, its good to know that minimum frame rates are also up which is always a good thing. With AA and AF enabled, the bottleneck has moved to the core and the memory clock advantage the Sapphire card has won't help here.


Unlike the other benchmarks, we had to resort to gameplay testing sessions with Need for Speed: Carbon. That means we had to measure frame rates with FRAPS while actually playing the game. Because of this, variations between runs are much higher. We're pleasantly surprised to see very little differences between each run and each card, mostly just 1 to 2 fps. A shader heavy game, core clock advantage is more useful here than memory bandwidth and all three cards once again offer similar, if not identical frame rates from 1024 x 768 at default settings all the way to 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF. For the best gaming experience, pick a setting and resolution where minimum frame rates don't go below 35 fps. 

Conclusion:

Since overall performance is basically identical between these three cards, the only differing factor is price and bundle. The Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro should be interesting for gamers who don't have lots of space inside their system. The trade off is of course the sparse bundle and slightly higher operating temperature. If you're going to use two of them for some Crossfire action, be sure you have the necessary Crossfire internal bridges. At this time, we are unable to confirm whether or not the newer cards do come with Crossfire bridges bundled. The MSI RX1950 Pro takes more space, but in return you'll get significantly cooler card. Though we did nitpick about the lack of cooling for the memory chips, you really don't need them if you're running the card at standard clocks. The need to shelve out additional dollars for the Crossfire bridges is a disappointment. Both cards offer hardware monitoring features and ATI's automatic overclocking tool - OVERDRIVE. It may interest some average users, but more hardcore users may find the OVERDRIVE's ability too 'conservative'.



Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro

We recommend the Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro because we think Gigabyte have put up an appealing package with this card. It may not have hardware monitoring functions, but you do get one Crossfire bridge. If you want to overclock your card, the bundled VTuner3 handles the job quite well. The dual slot cooling solution takes less space than the reference dual slot cooling solution or the one on MSI RX1950 Pro T2D256E. So, we think you get more value for your money with the Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro than the other two cards. 

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