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Jetway X1950 Pro 256MB PCI-E Video Card
Specifications:
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RADEON X1950PRO GPU
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Designed to run perfectly with the next-generation PCI
Express bus architecture. This new bus doubles the
bandwidth of AGP 8X delivering over 4 GB/sec. in both
upstream and downstream data transfers
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Integrated with 4-Channel 256-bit 256MB DDR3 memory
(1380MHz Effective! )
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Lossless Z Compression & Fast Z-Buffer Clear
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Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
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Support for
Microsoft DirectX 10 & Shader Model 3.0
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| Drivers & Support |
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Windows 98 / ME / 2000 / XP / Vista
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Linux Compatible
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Microsoft DirectX 9.0C Compatible
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Support for OpenGL 2.0
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Main Features
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- 384 million transistors on 90nm
fabrication process
- Up to 36 pixel shader processors
- Up to 512-bit internal ring bus for
memory reads
- Fully associative texture, color, and
Z/stencil cache designs
- Complete feature set also supported in
OpenGL 2.0
- Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9,
VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding
- Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and
color space conversion
- Full speed 128-bit floating point
processing for all shader operations
- Dedicated branch execution units for
high performance dynamic branching and flow control
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First Impressions:
Lets take a closer look at the card.
As you can see from the top, the Jetway design is
nearly identical to the reference build out. The small single
card heatsink solution is smaller than those seen from ATI and
should make Crossfire or multiple card solutions achievable on even
the tightest multi-GPU setups.
This X1950 Pro offers the standard VGA and DVI
ports along side the S-Video output.
Not much to see here, but the opaque fan with the
shiny ATI sticker makes the otherwise simple setup look like its
more expensive higher end brothers.
These designs have come along way over the last
few years to put the X1950 series well within most budgets making it
a perfect choice for a casual gamer or a full slot home theater
setup.
The Jetway version of the X1950 pro uses a common
12 V power adapter rather than the newer 6 or 8 pin video leads.
This is another decision aimed at making the card a great upgrade
choice for a budget gaming build or an older PCI-E setup with out
requiring a new power supply to get things running.
Jetway ships the X1950 Pro 356 MB with a user's
manual, S-Video cable, a 12 V power splitter, the drivers disk and
of course the card.
The Install:
To test the Jetway X1950
Pro I used a build based in the
ASUS P5W DH Deluxe
motherboard. The build includes an
Intel Core 2 Duo
e6600 and a 4x GB kit of Muskin
Series XP2-6400 powered by an
Antec TPQ-1000 Watt Power Supply.
Storage was provided by both a 2x74GB WD Raptors, 1x750GB
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
drives and a Lite-on 16x DVD burner all mounted in a
AeroCool AE Plus chassis.
For
comparison I will be testing
my
EVGA 7800 GTX (500/1350MHz) cooled by an Artic Cooling 5 series cooler. I
usually run a set of these cards in SLI on my ASUS motherboard but
my only other single is an 8800 series card. Some how I think
a single 7800 will make for a better comparison.
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Hardware |
Model |
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Motherboard: |
ASUS P5W
DH Deluxe |
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CPU |
Intel
e6600 |
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Memory |
4x GB kit of Muskin Series
XP2-6400 |
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Graphics |
Jetway X1050 Pro 256MB |
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Power Supply |
Antec TPQ-1000 Watt |
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Drives |
2x74GB WD Raptors, 1x750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 |
I installed the Jetway X1950 using the latest ATI
Catalyst drivers, Version 7.10 dated October 11, 2007. The
Nvidia card will use the ForceWare Release 163 dated November
6,2007. For those of you unfamiliar with the ATI Catalyst
drivers and the basics of overclocking the X1900 series cards, I
would refer you to my article
Operation Crossfire.
I will be attempting to overclock the Jetway
card with a variety of ATI tuning utilities. Among them will
be ATItool
0.26 (released Dec 08 2006), and both the
RivaTuner V 2.06 and
ATI Tray Tools Version
1.3.6.10.421
from
The Guru of 3D.
And here is s quick look under the hood! As
you can see the Jetway X1950 uses 256 MB of DDR3 memory. The
clocks reported here are just shy of the rated 575 MHZ Core clock
and 600 MHz for the memory.
You may have noticed there is no ATI Overdrive
option listed in the Catalyst Control Center. Although on many
cards this ATI provided too can allow for a quick and dirty
overclock, it is not supported on this card. After an
afternoon of working with the Jetway X1950 Pro, it appears this is
due to a lack of onboard temperature monitoring.
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