System setup and notes
Hardware
| Graphics card(s) | GeCube Radeon X1950 Pro AGP 256MiB (573.75/1377) | Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro AGP 512MiB (580.5/1404) | ATI Radeon X800XT PE AGP 256MiB (520/1120) | EVGA e-GeForce 7800GS Superclocked AGP 256MiB (460/1350) | NVIDIA GeForce 7800GS AGP 256MiB (375/1200) | ASUS EAX1950PRO PCIe 256MiB (580.5/1404) | Inno3D iChiLL 7900GS 256MiB (550/1500) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 Socket-940 (2.40GHz, 1MiB L2 cache, single-core) | Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB, LGA775) | |||||
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP-940 (nForce3 PRO 150) | ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe (975X+ICH7R) | EVGA NF68 (NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI) | ||||
| Memory | 1GBytes (2 x 512MByte) Samsung PC3200 ECC Registered CL3 - DDR1 + 1GBytes (2 x 512MByte) Samsung PC3200 ECC Registered CL3 | 1GBytes (2 x 512MByte) OCZ26671024ELDCGE-K PC5400 - DDR2 | |||||
| Memory timings and speed | 3-3-3-8 1T @ 400MHz | 4-4-4-8 2T @ 667MHz | |||||
| PSU | FSP Green Power FSP400-60GLN | ||||||
| Monitor | Dell 2405FPW - 1920x1200 | ||||||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | ||||||
| Mainboard software | NVIDIA platform driver 5.11 | Intel Inf 8.0.1.1002 | NVIDIA platform driver 9.53 | ||||
| Graphics driver | CATALYST 7.1 | ForceWare 93.71 | CATALYST 7.1 | ForceWare 93.71 | |||
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | ||||||
Software
| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.30 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 |
|---|
Notes
There's a lot to take in here. We have a total of 5 AGP-based graphics cards in this line-up, including the two review models.The Radeon X800 XT PE (remember this?), a stock-clocked GeForce 7800 GS, and overclocked SKU of the same model will tell us just where the X1950 Pro AGP's performance sits amongst some established AGP cards.
The AGP testbed is representative, we feel, of the kind of system that potential purchasers of either X1950 Pro would run.
Comparing directly against PCIe is fraught with problems, but we've included an ASUS X1950 Pro 256MiB card and Inno3D GeForce 7900 GS (overclocked), both run on a midrange Intel Core 2 Duo platform, to provide some comparison numbers from a mid-priced PC today.
The question will be, we suppose, is how the AGP variants compares with their PCIe brethren, and how do they benchmark against 3 other AGP cards.
We manually downclocked the GeCube SKU down to near-reference levels due to it, incorrectly, shipping pre-overclocked.
Benchmarks were conducted at 1280x1024 4xAA 8xAF and 1600x1200 no AA 8xAF. These are likely resolutions and image quality settings for midrange cards, and we've run the cards through three popular games.
As always, we ran each benchmark a trio of times and then calculated the arithmetic mean. If any of the three results looked erroneous, we threw all three away until we could collect three within a margin of statistical error. We report any major attempts needed to get three reliable results, of course. Apart from that, things are as noted on the graphs and in the graph commentary. Want to know more? Head for the HEXUS.community.
