Sapphire Radeon X1950GT – Testing 256MB vs. 512MB memory

Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up Our Rating: 7.5%       Manufacturer: Sapphire Technology

The Card

Moving onto the card the first thing we notice when pulling it out is that the card uses a longer cooler when compared to the Palit X1950GT that we recently reviewed but it does take up only a single slot. This is always a better option for people who are limited for space and may use something like a Shuttle XPC or any other form of micro casing.

Turning the card over it is very much the same old; we can see the X bracket that keeps the large heatsink in place, our normal stickers, and a HDCP sticker that lets you know that it supports it.

Like majority of higher end mid-range cards on the market today, an extra source of power is needed and the Radeon X1950GT series is no different. If your power supply doesn’t come with a PCI Express plug, as we saw in the box, a Molex to PCI Express converter is included.

Moving around to the top of the card we have two SLI like connectors which of course are needed to make use of Crossfire dual graphics technology. The card comes with a single Crossfire connector and when you buy the second card you get the other required cable.

I/O wise we have Dual DVI as we saw on the front of the box, we also have our run of the mill TV out port which supports HDTV out via component cable. Both of the DVI ports are not only Dual Link compatible but are also HDCP compliant which means you can use this graphics card to playback HD movie content from sources such as HD DVD and Blu-ray.

Sapphire’s Radeon X1950GT comes with the same clock speeds as the Palit 512MB version which is 500MHz core and 1200MHz DDR memory clock. The only difference between both cards besides the physical appearance is that one utilizes 256MB of DDR-3 (Sapphire) memory and the other uses 512MB of DDR-3 (Palit) memory.