Sapphire Radeon X1950 PRO AGP Tested

EliteBastards take a further look at the Sapphire Radeon X1950 PRO AGP. The most obvious difference in Sapphire's Radeon X1950 PRO over a reference board is the inclusion of a RIALTO bridge chip on its rear, allowing for it the core to be used on an AGP interface. That aside, this board also finds itself with smallcore and memory clock speed boosts over reference speeds, sporting a core clock of 580MHz, with memory clocked at 700MHz - An increase of 5 and 10MHz respectively. To cap it all off, Sapphire have doubled the frame buffer of this board over the reference design, equipping it with 512MB of GDDR3 memory. Impressive stuff indeed.

As review conclusions go, this is a pretty simple one to wrap up in essence - The Radeon X1950 PRO is the fastest, most fully featured graphics board money can buy that makes use of the AGP interface. It brings everything that we loved about RV570 on PCI Express - Great performance and a very solid feature set at a decent price point - Then leverages the lack of competition in the AGP arena to make it look like a King amongst Men. Well, a King amongst graphics boards at least.

As far as Sapphire's Radeon X1950 PRO goes, this most excellent board is complemented nicely by the use of a single-slot cooler, and a very comprehensive bundle that gives you everything you could possibly need, befitting of its high-end stature for the interface on which it resides. There also seems to be little in the way of a price increase over the PCI Express variant of this SKU, which is great to see as well.

Of course, we do have to put forth some negatives for this board, the biggest of which is its power requirements - The need for two Molex connectors may require some juggling of your power supply connectors, if not even upgrading your PSU if it isn't up to the job. High Definition playback also wasn't up to scratch - Considering we witnessed frames dropped on both ATI and NVIDIA AGP boards, it suggests to me than H.264 and this ageing interface simply don't sit well together.