Sapphire has theme of three like minded graphics cards

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Product: Sapphire X1950 Pro
Website: WWW.SAPPHIRETECH.COM
System Requirements: Motherboard with available AGP 4/8x or PCIe x16 slot
Price: AGP - £140 / $250 , Pro - £125 / $200 Ultimate - £140 / $250

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THIS REVIEW provides an interesting comparison in technologies by comparing three almost identical graphics cards. All three are from Sapphire and all three use the ATI X1950 Pro GPU, the difference is that one is the AGP version, one is the vanilla version and one is the Ultimate version. For the sake of convenience we will refer to the vanilla version as the Pro in this review.
Ultimate box for the Ultimate card

The more standard box

The boxes these products come in show just how similar they are, with the AGP and Pro versions being virtually identical and the Ultimate standing out in Sapphire's sexy looking translucent plastic box design. Although it's less environmentally friendly it does look a lot better than the rather plain white cardboard boxes its counterparts arrive in. In all three you'll find the usual accompaniment of manuals, CD's, adaptors and cables to make sure you're up and running with minimal fuss.

Spec sheet for all three cards

As you might have guessed, according to the spec sheet there really isn't much between them either. The AGP comes with 512MB GDDR3 memory compared to the 256MB found on the PCIe versions and the Ultimate has its memory clocked 200MHz higher than the others at 1600MHz. The other point of note is that both the PCIe cards support ATI's newer internal Crossfire2 setup.

From top to bottom, Ultimate / Pro / AGP

As you can see from the picture these cards even look remarkably similar, particularly from the front as they all offer Dual-DVI outputs as well as s-video out. On the boards themselves, the AGP and Pro cards use Sapphire's stock cooler and the Ultimate is factory fitted with Zalman's popular VF900-Cu cooler and coloured memory heastsinks. The PCIe cards both have a single six pin power connector whereas the AGP version draws power from two Molex connectors, which may prove a problem for those running older PSUs and may be running low on available power and connectors.

The PCIe cards were tested in on an Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard running and AMD 3800+ CPU and 2GB DDR RAM. The AGP card was tested on an Intel D875PBZ motherboard running an Intel 3.2GHz CPU and 1GB DDR RAM. Surprise, surprise the results are also remarkably similar.

Results

Joking aside, the biggest surprise to us was just how well the AGP fared, we were expecting some decent results, but the fact that the AGP card stands shoulder to shoulder with its PCIe counterparts kind of makes you wander what the point of the PCI Express technology is. While AGP is still pretty decent by today's gaming standards it lacks the headroom needed by other GPU intensive applications such as media encoding. The extra 256MB of memory also helps to bolster the AGP cards results and keep it going toe to toe with the other cards.

At first glance the Ultimate's results seem fairly disappointing, but it should be noted here that the only performance boost that Sapphire has given the Ultimate is a 200MHZ bump in memory clock speed, so we shouldn't be expecting great things. The other thing to bear in mind is that with the addition of the Zalman cooler, the card runs significantly cooler and quieter than the other two cards, which will help with overall PC noise and life span of the card.

In Short
To be honest we were hoping the results would be somewhat more spectacular, that the AGP card would, for reasons magical or unknown beat out its technically superior counterparts or that the Ultimate version would be streaks ahead of the competition. Alas it was not to be and the results are pretty much as we expected, that all three of these graphics cards are very similar.

All is not lost though, there are still some important things we can distil from this information. First and foremost the X1950 Pro is a very impressive chipset and gives you a great bang for your buck. If you're not too fussed about DirectX 10 and you're looking for a mid-ranged card that will handle today's latest games with a good amount of eye candy then we reckon you really need look no further.

The Zalman cooler is about £25 on its own, so if you were going to be replacing the stock cooler anyway then the Ultimate card will save you ten quid and you'll keep your warranty intact as well. If you still have a motherboard that uses AGP and you want to squeeze some more life out of it then the X1950 Pro AGP will inject a nice performance boost, especially if you're gaming. If you're not going to be overclocking and happy with the stock cooler then the standard Sapphire X1950 Pro card should definitely be on your list of candidates and if you have an extra £25 then you could even spring for the 512MB version that should outperform the Ultimate when the settings and eye candy are cranked right up. ?

The Good
All - An excellent mid-range chipset
AGP - Best performing AGP graphics card around
Pro -Excellent example of ATI's X1950 Pro chipset, great performance at a reasonable price
Ultimate - Zalman cooler looks lovely and is better and quieter than the stock cooler

The Bad
All - Lack of DirectX 10 support could become a problem in the months to come

The Ugly
Bundle could be better. Ultimate comes with Just Cause, the Pro includes The da Vinci Code game and the AGP has no game at all, which may be considered a blessing given the other two offerings

Bartender's Report
All -