Hey coopz, I just RMA'd my second HIS 2 weeks ago and pretty much have had it with them, at least where the X1950 Pro's are concerned. Anyway, my Gecube X1950XT TEC/Turbo 256 MB AGP card just came yesterday and instead of me blathering on here is what I posted on some of other sites about it .....
OK, here are a few my not so quick impressions of the Gecube X1950XT. The first thing that struck me even before getting to the card was the Box it came in. It's huge with a very nice picture of Ruby I might add. (I dig redheads) It reminds me of the good old days when men were men and graphics cards came packaged in boxes the size of a small piece of luggage. Anyway, after opening the box I could see why. The card was massive, taking up the AGP slot plus 2 PCI slots. The pictures really don't do it justice and I think if I put it on top of my FX 5200 (tweener card) it would probably crush it. Luckily I have plenty of room in my case. The next thing I did was to examine the card to see if everything was attached properly and to my horror I immediately noticed they did not have any ramsinks attached to any of the memory chips and that there is about ½ inch of clearance between the memory chips and the cooler. So at this point I had visions of my 2 faulty HIS cards dancing around in my head.
Next, the install. Took 5 minutes and even as big as the card is, it fit fine and had plenty of clearance on all sides. Now for the part you've been waiting for, the performance. This is probably going to disappoint you as it did me briefly but it is not a whole lot faster than the HIS X1950 Pro ICEQ3 Turbo, at least on my rig anyway, but at least this card works CPU bottleneck and all! The default clocks on the card are 648 Mhz. Core and 700 Mhz (1400 mhz. Effective) for the memory. I have only done a few runs of 3DMark05/06 so far and the results are below. Note, you can't expect the same performance from this card as you would get from the PCI-E card. The PCI-E X1950XT's generally have their memory clocked at 1800 Mhz. Effective as the default.
HIS ICEQ3 Turbo 512MB (when it worked) Core 620 Mhz. / Memory 1480 Mhz. effective - $289
3DMark05: 9231
3DMark06: 4390
Gecube X1950XT TEC Turbo Fan 256 MB / Core 648 Mhz. / Memory 1400 Mhz. effective - $269
3DMark05: 9526
3DMark06: 4683
The next thing I tried was to see how far I could push the card and to be honest I didn't have much hope for the card considering the memory does not have any ramsinks as I mentioned before. I first used ATI's Cat.7.3 Overdrive but that did not allow for memory overclocking as the slider only went from 701-702 Mhz. So I loaded up ATI Tray Tools. After a little trial and error I found stable clocks of 675 Mhz. for the core which is actually the recommended maximum by Gecube and they're right, pushed it up a few notches to 683 Mhz. and the GPU shut down. As far as the memory goes, I was pleasantly surprised and managed 800 Mhz (1600 Mhz. effective). Artifacts began appearing around 850 Mhz. and decided to back it off a bit since perfromance gains are nominal. I'm actually pretty amazed I could overclock the memory at all. For testing stability I ran ATI Tray Tools 3DRenderer for 3 hours with maximum temps reached 70c which is normal and given as the average temp under 3D load by Gecube. I also bumped up the FAN speed to 90% with ATI Tray Tools with no noticeable noise from my already noisy case. Overclocking results below.....
Gecube X1950XT TEC Turbo Fan 256 MB / Core 675 Mhz. / Memory 1600 Mhz. effective - $269
3DMark05: 9763
3DMark06: 4860
I'd love to see what this card could do with a better CPU and a socket 939 motherboard in dual channel mode.....
Enough of that, now how about gaming. Haven't had much time unfortunately but I tested it with Prey, Quake 4, Doom3 and my son's Marvel Alliance. Graphics quality is outstanding as is the X1950 Pro. Gaming at 1680x1050 whenever possible and with everything maxed and getting decent frame rates. Speaking of framerates, how do you shut the counter off in ATI Tray Tools. Everytime I load the thing I forget. One thing I noticed almost immediately was, I'll call it “perceived speed. Everything I played just “felt” faster with movements appearing much more fluid and realistic.
So am I happy with the purchase. Hell yeah. It's $20 cheaper than the HIS X1950 Pro ICEQ3 I had, it's faster, although not by much, but most importantly the bloody thing WORKS!!
Well, that's all for now and of course I'll be doing some more tweaking so see if I can squeeze any more performance out of the card. I'll keep you posted.
.....and as for all you guy with working X1950 Pro's. Keep'em, they're great cards and I wouldn't even think about upgrading to this one unless you have money to burn. For those sitting on the fence right now about buying the Pro. Jump off and buy THIS card instead. Although talking bang for the buck, I still think the Sapphire X1950 Pro is it.
http://www.gecube.com/products-detail.php?prod_cat_pid=9&prod_cat_id=166&prod_id=65116
