|
|
|
Give your AGP system a new lease of gaming life
The AGP slot celebrates its tenth birthday this year and refuses to disappear despite being superseded by PCI Express in 2004. The Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro is one such AGP card, based on ATI's RV 570 chip running at 580MHz.
A x16 PCI Express slot offers read transfer rates double that of AGP 8x slot, however, this wasn't reflected in tests. In 3Dmark03 the card scored a very respectable 14,441 and notched up 7,233 in 3DMark05. Compared with a PCI Express X1950 Pro, these scores represent decreases of 8 per cent in 3Dmark03 and 16 per cent in 3Dmark05.
In real world gaming tests we found a decrease due to using AGP of 11 per cent in Far Cry, while Half-Life 2 suffered most at 47fps – 23 per cent slower than a PCI Express equivalent.
When x4 Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA), which smoothes edges, was turned on we saw no decrease at low resolutions. The PCI Express version saw drops with FSAA (although still scoring high overall), however, it has further to fall and FSAA isn't affected by the bandwidth constrictions of AGP.
Despite a moderate performance hit for using AGP, this card still provides good performance in all games at 1,024x768 and 1,280x1024 resolutions. At high resolutions gaming proved unplayable with this card.
The card features two DVI-I ports that can handle digital and analogue monitors when used with the two bundled dongles. S-video and composite cables are included to hook your PC up to a TV.
The X1950 Pro doesn't support DirectX10 like the 8800GTS and has a more modest performance but an equally modest price tag to boot. The card costs the same as PCI express version at £155, which is a fair price for the fastest AGP currently available.
Pros: Fastest AGP card on the market; reasonable price
Cons: Slower than PCI Express equivalent
Overall: The best bet for AGP users to get decent frame rates
in all games
Be a money saving expert
Return of the Mac computer
The benefits of owning a smartphone
Choose Gold, Silver or Bronze membership
Save up to 40% on the cover price of each issue
Get access to the subscriber club exclusive website
Our price won't be beaten by any shop or website
We ask why ebooks readers have no embedded fonts or easily accessible footnotes and how typographical errors not in the original book appear
|
|
|
|
|
Nikon Coolpix S570 BlackPrice: £66.99 |
Computeractive Ultimate Guide - Storage, Sharing & BackupPrice: £5.99 |
Back Issue CD-Rom 13 (2010)Price: £9.99 |
Hallmark Card Studio DeluxePrice: £15.31 |
Marine AquariumPrice: £15.41 |
This article is a little skewed...
AGP has never passed its bandwidth limit. In fact the x1950 is a PCI-E chip with an AGP bridge on the back for conversion. I have the Sapphire card and have replaced the fan, so I have seen the PCI-E logo on the main chip. If a direct comparison is done between PCI-E and AGP, you must use the same CPU, RAM ect. The only thing that should change is the main board as no board has both PCI-E and AGP. Every review of the Sapphire x1950 pro AGP, had good scores with games like Oblivion. The Oblivion HDR mountain area benchmark (@1920x1200x32 0xAA 8xAF) scored 43.1 frames per second, and the PCI-E 42.6! (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/sapphire _x1950_pro_agp_ultimate_review/page11.asp) The HIS version of the same X1950 AGP card scored 50 FPS where as the PCI-E version got 49 in a similar test (http://www.hwupgrade.com/articles/video/31/sapphire-and-his-radeon-x1950pro-revisiting-agp-part-1_7.html) That is only 2 sites of several which post scores neck n' neck with both versions of the card. Secret: both sites used the same CPU for testing AGP vs. PCI-E. An AMD CPU was used as they have boards that come with either PCI-E or AGP. Intel changed their CPU socket for boards with PCI-E, so a test with an Intel system is not a good comparison.
Posted by Paul Egger, 13 Apr 2007
Intel processors do make for a good comparison
We used two Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz processors for testing. One was a 478-pin socket, the other a 775-pin socket. The old AGP platform used DDR ram, the newer DDR2, however both used the same WD Raptor hard disk. Although it's true this isn't an apples to apples comparison, it's as close as you'll get with Intel platforms. And since Intel dominates 75 per cent of the processor market, we've used its chips instead of AMDs, because that's a more realistic reflection of what the public owns. Finally, AGP has reached its limits, with regard to data going from the graphics card to the CPU. This bandwidth has been vastly increased and lets game developers offload things like line of sight calculations to the graphics card. This makes a big difference in some newer games.
Posted by Emil Larsen, 13 Apr 2007
Power PC G5
Would the x1950 work in a Macintosh G5 with the AGPx8 graphics card slot. Current card is the ATI Radeon 9600
Posted by Paul Sampson, 24 Mar 2008