Quote:
The pervasiveness of PCIe has rendered new AGP SKUs all but dead. GeCube and Sapphire beg to differ and both have designed, in-house, AGP cards based on the impressive Radeon X1950 GPU. Are these sub-£150 wonders worth the cash, or is it better to sell up and move on over to PCIe?.
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would be nice to see how a Gainward 7800GS+ 512MB gets on against it.
Good to see agp still been used :)
Yup :)
Having 2 molex connectors on the Sapphire shouldn't be that surprising - it's reasonable to expect that some AGP only computers don't have PSUs with PCI-E power connectors :)
Kalniel,
It's not surprising, but a 6-pin power adapter hooks up to a couple of Molexs, as per the GeCube card, so it's just a matter of style.
Sapphire already produces an X1950 Pro PCB (PCIe) with the requisite 6-pin power connector, and that's why the change to two Molexs raised a very small eyebrow. :)
VERY timely review!
I'm really pleased that AMD and its two partners have come up with these cards.
I absolutely do want such a card and believe that there must be a whole lot of other people like me - with perfectly good PCs that badly lacking only on the graphics side.
Such PCs are, hopefully, going to be good for at least a couple more years, so I see the Sapphire's twin-port HDCPI support as a bit of a bonus.
What's the score with changing the cooling fans on such cards - are there readily-available low-noise replacements that will do as good a job (or better) than the originals?
If so, what sort of price, where to look and how easy/hard is it going to be to swap over fans?
afaik as ATI's bridge chip is on the back of the card something such as the VF-900 should work
As you can see on my system near my avatar I've ordered the Sapphire one, the larger memory will be helpful in textures. ;)
I am very happy with the Sapphire card. New games look good and run smoothly. The VF 900-cu fits and keeps the card cool.
A great option for perple who's still using the motherboard with agp.