VGA trio: EVGA, Leadtek & Sapphire - Sapphire Radeon X1950 XT
Author: Josip Brombauer
Date: 29 Nov 2006

Sapphire Radeon X1950 XT
The third and final card in this mini-test brings some ATI flavour into the mix. Sapphire?s naming scheme is as simple and straightforward as it can be (just as EVGA?s is), so you know right from the start what you?re buying. We happen to like that approach. The x1950 XT GPU on this card has 48 pixel shader and 8 vertex shader processors, clocked at 625 MHz. It is equipped with 256 MB of GDDR3 memory running at hefty 1800 MHz over a 256-bit bus. The card itself is a two-slot design, which is regrettable when compared to the Leadtek 7950 GT. It also tends to get fairly hot, and as a result fairly loud when under heavy load for a longer time period, which we didn?t find to be altogether pleasing. Another issue is a strange buzzing sound that we?ve noticed coming from the card during benchmarking. It was particularly annoying during the 3DMark03 benchmark, but was also present in some other games, albeit to a lesser extent.
Two Dual Link DVIs are standard for this class of graphics card, and the Sapphire X1950 XT is no exception. Two DVI to VGA adapters are provided, along with all the necessary cables (HDTV, S-video, Composite) and a driver CD. The card features support for ATI?s CrossFire.
For some unknown reason, we were unable to get the card to work with the 6.11 Catalyst downloaded from AMD-ATI?s website, it simply wouldn?t install saying that the card or the OS is not supported. Nevertheless, the 6.10 drivers present on the CD installed just fine so we managed to complete the test results with them. Also, since this GPU does not support 8xS antialiasing found on Nvidia cards, we were forced to bench using 6xAA, so bear that in mind while looking over the results.