X1950 Pro AGP is coming!

[CaiNaM]

hmm.. even on my wife's computer with (3000+ @ 2.5ghz) 1gb ram, it's considerably faster w/ higher settings than the old 6800gt (2xfaster in FEAR and Oblivion).

 

[KutterMax]

I purchased a Powercolor x1950 Pro AGP orginally to put in a rig with P4 3.2 and an ASUS P4C-800E Deluxe motherboard. I ran this setup for a while but was having a lot of stability issues with the new card. I wasn't certain whether it was the card or not (WoW:The Burning Crusade was crashing a lot so I thought it may be a software issue but wasn't certain)

I ended up putting a new build together with a ASROCK 775Dual-VSTA and a C2D E6600. With the x1950 Pro I still have a ton of stability issues in WoW. Turns out there are a ton of posts related to this on the www.worldofwarcraft.com forums. After going through many forum posts I decided to RMA the card. With the new motherboard I now had the option of putting a PCI-E card in - so I picked up a BFG 7950 GT OC. To be honest - this was the best move I made - the 7950 has been rock solid and I haven't had any further instability issues.

It seems there are a lot of problems with the x1950 Pro's.

 

[CaiNaM]

strange.. we have no issues with the x1950pro and WOW...

 

[KutterMax]

One of the debates on the WoW forums is whether it is a hardware or software issue. I wasn't certain and that's why I RMA'd the card.

However my guess is that it is a hardware issue and that their appear to be a high percentage of faulty x1950 Pro's. There are people who are using them and not having any problems, but many others are. There are seem to be a fair number of complaints from people running PCI-E x1950's as well.

 

[mismajor99]

I got mine in as well, and had a little hiccup when I first intstalled the drivers, as my screen went black(no signal to the monitor), anyway everything seems to be running fine though. Hey a dumb question for everyone, do you have to use both the connectors on the X1950 Pro? It seems that you can get away with just running one molex cable to the card. Anyone?

 

[mismajor99]

Damn, I got a very noticeable difference from X850XT. I just ran BF2142 on near max settings for about an hour with no problems at all. Going to run 3dmark to see what kind of jump it made "artificially" speaking.

 

[zcubed]

u have to have both molex plugs in for the card to work properly. i dont even know if it can boot with just one connector.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: mismajor99
I got mine in as well, and had a little hiccup when I first intstalled the drivers, as my screen went black(no signal to the monitor), anyway everything seems to be running fine though. Hey a dumb question for everyone, do you have to use both the connectors on the X1950 Pro? It seems that you can get away with just running one molex cable to the card. Anyone?

use both

and zcubed ... that would be high for my rig

as long as 2GB solves it ... seems OK ...

i'd suggest if you play a game like Gothic3 that *needs* 2GB of RAM, to shut down the extra running processes or you will have the same problems

Quad Core and 4GB of RAM will fix most *anything*
:Q

 

[GEOrifle]

And FINALY: wich card is worth to buy: Diamond, Sapphire, HIS, Powercolor or Gecube ?
(I'm talking about quality and not a price).

 

[zcubed]

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: mismajor99
I got mine in as well, and had a little hiccup when I first intstalled the drivers, as my screen went black(no signal to the monitor), anyway everything seems to be running fine though. Hey a dumb question for everyone, do you have to use both the connectors on the X1950 Pro? It seems that you can get away with just running one molex cable to the card. Anyone?

use both

and zcubed ... that would be high for my rig

as long as 2GB solves it ... seems OK ...

i'd suggest if you play a game like Gothic3 that *needs* 2GB of RAM, to shut down the extra running processes or you will have the same problems

Quad Core and 4GB of RAM will fix most *anything*
:Q

i dont play gothic3 and a quad-core is useless atm since nothing is really optimized for quads yet. things r barely even optimized for dual cores yet lol. 2GB is more than enough for me. if i could figure out why svchost.exe is so huge in taking up RAM i wouldnt have this issue. but its not really an issue since nothing runs slowly.

 

[zodder]

x1950 Pro + 2407fpw = WoW bliss!

 

[Assimilator1]

Originally posted by: zcubed

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: zcubed
personally i think that 1 gb ram is holding u back a bit. i find taht in my system even when im not playing games the system uses about 750mb RAM so that doesnt leave much room for games. but then i got 2gb and everything runs considerably better. going from a 7800gs to this was a good jump for me as well. not unbelievable but quite nice enugh to max everything out. and whats ur processor?

good god ... what OS and what aps are you running in the background to use 750 MB at 'idle'?
:Q

lol sounds crazy right? antivirus (30-40mb), browser (55-80mb), svchost.exe(whatever that is 320mb), sqlservr (25mb), msn (20mb), aim (10mb), explorer.exe( 30mb). total for that comes to ~500mb. i usually have about 45 processes running. 45-7=38. so from 38 misc processes theres about 200-250mb. i almost always have my browser open not to mention a bunch of this running hence the need for the dual-core processor. tasks tend not to interfere with my gaming. never seen 'idle' use under 650mb. Win XP Pro w/SP2.

lol , my svchosts are using about 39MB!
I've got 1GB of RAM & atm I have 600MB free ,& that's with running DPAD & DIMEs as well as the usual programs.No idea why yours is using so much RAM

KutterMax
Sounds like a driver issue ,maybe.

 

[zcubed]

gave the comp a restart(hadnt done that in almost a week) the biggest svchost is down to 50mb now...but i have 8 svchost.exe open lol. i dunno why but windows is splitting my services into a lot of svchosts. oh well.

 

[Sven Hassel]

Ok I`ve had this card for a few days and I can safely say.....
Its rubbish........typical ATI card.. artifacts on BF2, just plane stops for no aparant reason on some games (this is meant to be a common fault).
I will be attempting to send this back asap...Im going back to nvidia....
I told myself last time i bought an ATI card not to make the same mistake again...but I did.
Ive had 5 or 6 nvidia cards and never had a problem, thats 2 ATI cards and both have been a total pain.
I have the HISpro turbo 512 AGP card...dont waiste your time and money...just buy an nvidia card.

 

[hellokeith]

Had 4 ATI cards, never a single problem.

 

[zcubed]

ive owned several of both brands and ive only had problems when my psu was not up to par. might be ur issue.

 

[GEOrifle]

Originally posted by: Sven Hassel
Ok I`ve had this card for a few days and I can safely say.....
Its rubbish........typical ATI card.. artifacts on BF2, just plane stops for no aparant reason on some games (this is meant to be a common fault).
I will be attempting to send this back asap...Im going back to nvidia....
I told myself last time i bought an ATI card not to make the same mistake again...but I did.
Ive had 5 or 6 nvidia cards and never had a problem, thats 2 ATI cards and both have been a total pain.
I have the HISpro turbo 512 AGP card...dont waiste your time and money...just buy an nvidia card.

What's wrong with HIS X1950PRO 512 mb ? Is 7800GS better?

 

[postmortemIA]

Originally posted by: Sven Hassel
Ok I`ve had this card for a few days and I can safely say.....
Its rubbish........typical ATI card.. artifacts on BF2, just plane stops for no aparant reason on some games (this is meant to be a common fault).
I will be attempting to send this back asap...Im going back to nvidia....
I told myself last time i bought an ATI card not to make the same mistake again...but I did.
Ive had 5 or 6 nvidia cards and never had a problem, thats 2 ATI cards and both have been a total pain.
I have the HISpro turbo 512 AGP card...dont waiste your time and money...just buy an nvidia card.

Your post is rubbish. There are millions if not billions of people using ATi cards without problems. And nvidia has their own set of problems as well.

 

[zcubed]

Originally posted by: GEOrifle

Originally posted by: Sven Hassel
Ok I`ve had this card for a few days and I can safely say.....
Its rubbish........typical ATI card.. artifacts on BF2, just plane stops for no aparant reason on some games (this is meant to be a common fault).
I will be attempting to send this back asap...Im going back to nvidia....
I told myself last time i bought an ATI card not to make the same mistake again...but I did.
Ive had 5 or 6 nvidia cards and never had a problem, thats 2 ATI cards and both have been a total pain.
I have the HISpro turbo 512 AGP card...dont waiste your time and money...just buy an nvidia card.

What's wrong with HIS X1950PRO 512 mb ? Is 7800GS better?

the 7800gs doesnt even come close. the x1950pro is the agp king. some ppl just dont have a system that can cope with its requirements.

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: Sven Hassel
Ok I`ve had this card for a few days and I can safely say.....
Its rubbish........typical ATI card.. artifacts on BF2, just plane stops for no aparant reason on some games (this is meant to be a common fault).
I will be attempting to send this back asap...Im going back to nvidia....
I told myself last time i bought an ATI card not to make the same mistake again...but I did.
Ive had 5 or 6 nvidia cards and never had a problem, thats 2 ATI cards and both have been a total pain.
I have the HISpro turbo 512 AGP card...dont waiste your time and money...just buy an nvidia card.

The troll is strong with this one.

I have used both over the years and I currently have 8 rigs with a mixture of ATI and Nvidia cards in them...there really isn't much difference between them to be honest.

Although I have noticed that my X1950 Pro (and my old 9700Pro's) does have a slightly better IQ than my 7800GS and 6800's....nothing to dramatic, just the images seem to be slighty crsiper on my ATI's than my Nvidia's

But other than that, who cares? they both do the same job in the end.

 

[zcubed]

Originally posted by: Stumps

Originally posted by: Sven Hassel
Ok I`ve had this card for a few days and I can safely say.....
Its rubbish........typical ATI card.. artifacts on BF2, just plane stops for no aparant reason on some games (this is meant to be a common fault).
I will be attempting to send this back asap...Im going back to nvidia....
I told myself last time i bought an ATI card not to make the same mistake again...but I did.
Ive had 5 or 6 nvidia cards and never had a problem, thats 2 ATI cards and both have been a total pain.
I have the HISpro turbo 512 AGP card...dont waiste your time and money...just buy an nvidia card.

The troll is strong with this one.

I have used both over the years and I currently have 8 rigs with a mixture of ATI and Nvidia cards in them...there really isn't much difference between them to be honest.

Although I have noticed that my X1950 Pro (and my old 9700Pro's) does have a slightly better IQ than my 7800GS and 6800's....nothing to dramatic, just the images seem to be slighty crsiper on my ATI's than my Nvidia's

But other than that, who cares? they both do the same job in the end.

take a look at this article: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/02/01/agp-platform-analysis/
it will show u that not only does the x1950pro do better in synthetic bechmarks but also in games especially at higher resolutions. this article also focuses on how ur cpu can bottleneck the card. very in-depth article.

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: zcubed

Originally posted by: Stumps

Originally posted by: Sven Hassel
Ok I`ve had this card for a few days and I can safely say.....
Its rubbish........typical ATI card.. artifacts on BF2, just plane stops for no aparant reason on some games (this is meant to be a common fault).
I will be attempting to send this back asap...Im going back to nvidia....
I told myself last time i bought an ATI card not to make the same mistake again...but I did.
Ive had 5 or 6 nvidia cards and never had a problem, thats 2 ATI cards and both have been a total pain.
I have the HISpro turbo 512 AGP card...dont waiste your time and money...just buy an nvidia card.

The troll is strong with this one.

I have used both over the years and I currently have 8 rigs with a mixture of ATI and Nvidia cards in them...there really isn't much difference between them to be honest.

Although I have noticed that my X1950 Pro (and my old 9700Pro's) does have a slightly better IQ than my 7800GS and 6800's....nothing to dramatic, just the images seem to be slighty crsiper on my ATI's than my Nvidia's

But other than that, who cares? they both do the same job in the end.

take a look at this article: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/02/01/agp-platform-analysis/
it will show u that not only does the x1950pro do better in synthetic bechmarks but also in games especially at higher resolutions. this article also focuses on how ur cpu can bottleneck the card. very in-depth article.

I wasn't refering to the performance of the cards when I said that there wasn't much difference between the two manufacturers, but rather their function....I've found no difference between using an ATI or Nvidia card....my systems don't behave any differently (other than performance....of course).

I have read those articles...and while I usually don't read to much into Toms articles, they were interesting enough to read.

As for what I personally think of the difference between my 7800GS and X1950Pro....well at stock speeds the X1950 gives the 7800GS an absolute thrashing at any resolution and settings...bar none.

At overclocked speeds, well my Sapphire is a pretty poor overclocker with it's standard HSF and doesn't get much higher than stock...which lets the 7800GS@550/1350 almost catch up to it....Almost....the difference can still get beyond 20% in some games still but in synthetic benchmarks (expect 3dmark 2005 and 06, a 25% difference in favor of the X1950Pro exsists there) and some Doom3 engine based games both are pretty much neck and neck.

 

[Sven Hassel]

Sorry, maybe I was a bit OTT there, but I do have to RMA my card and I was a bit annoyed as I had a 9700 which went the same way....

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: Sven Hassel
Sorry, maybe I was a bit OTT there, but I do have to RMA my card and I was a bit annoyed as I had a 9700 which went the same way....

sounds more like bad luck to me...

I have 2 9700pro's, a 9600XT, a 9500 (softmodded to 9500PRO) and of course my X1950....none have ever let me down...but the same goes for my Nvidia's....I have pretty much everything (except the FX series...yuk) from TNT2 upto 7800GS and they all work fine....

 

[CaiNaM]

Originally posted by: Stumps

Originally posted by: Sven Hassel
Sorry, maybe I was a bit OTT there, but I do have to RMA my card and I was a bit annoyed as I had a 9700 which went the same way....

sounds more like bad luck to me...

I have 2 9700pro's, a 9600XT, a 9500 (softmodded to 9500PRO) and of course my X1950....none have ever let me down...but the same goes for my Nvidia's....I have pretty much everything (except the FX series...yuk) from TNT2 upto 7800GS and they all work fine....

i've had pretty much the same experience (tho i also had the fx series nv cards).

no issues per se with either side until recently, when my old faithful 9800pro from one of my backup rig's started artifacting in 3D (still fine in 2D). warranty is out on it i believe..

then last week, the 6800GT in my wife's pc went completely dead after almost 3 yrs of usage. that one however is being rma'd as it's a BFG w/ 3 lifetime warranty. it's currently being replaced with an x1950P, which runs circles around the old GT (which will still find a way into a pc after it's returned from rma as, while it's not fastest, it's sill a useful card as it will run everything, even tho it has to sacrifice settings in newer games).

my wife really prefers the IQ of the x1950p over the 6800GT; she noticed a difference immediately. but I dygress as this isn't about that.

after dozens of cards and years of usage, i've had little technical/reliability problems with either brand. based on my own experience, i'd have to say either you have some issues with old driver bits lying around, your psu isn't enough for the x1950 (which requires like 30a on 12v rail), or, you just have incredibly bad luck.

fact is, if you need to freshen an agp rig with a vide card, you can't do better than an x1950p. for pcie, you can't do any better than nvida's 8800 series until at least march when the r600's start rolling out...