Středa, 19. prosinec 2007, autor: Mirek Jahoda

Radeon X1950 Pro is thanks to it's great price/performance ratio in the PC's of many users. But because of new games like many of you is thinking about upgrade. We have tested what is your best choice: buy second X1950 Pro for CrossFire, or change X1950 Pro for Radeon HD 3850 or straight go for more expensive GeForce 8800 GT? All answers in 17 game tests.

On the one of my computers I got to this situation: most of used components would be for new games enough, but I knew, that with more graphically demanding games, higher resolutions (20 and 22 inch LCD panels with 1 680 × 1 050 px aren't expensive) or anti-aliasing become my old good Radeon X1950 Pro breathless. I believe that the situation: you have Athlon 64 X2 > 2 GHz or Pentium Dual-Core/Core 2 Duo > 1,8 GHz, under Windows XP still nice 2 Gigabytes of memory and this graphic cars, is not rare.

Have you already seen?
Test of Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 under Windows Vista and with Core 2 Duo E6750
CrossFire theory and test at Intel P35, Windows Vista and Core 2 Duo 

In the mentioned combinations you can find such people which has two PCI Express ×16 slots for two graphic cards in CrossFire: the owners of the mainboards with chipsets like Intel 965P, P35 or ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 (or AMD 580X). These users are maybe thinking what is better choice: buy new graphic card for 180 USD (or in particular cases more), or rather go for second Radeon X1950 Pro (CrossFire). You are able to buy this card with silent cooling for 130 USD (inc. VAT):

PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro 256 MB AC2. With reasonable prace and direct with silent cooling Arctic Cooling Accelero X2. Source: www.pcmasters.de

It's not so important that the same case are cheaper Radeons X1950 GT, or if you have one X1950 Pro, you can buy X1950 GT and put it together in CrossFire (and in the ideal case overclock GT to Pro clocks). So, you can have the upgrade for 110 USD. But we are (of course) interested in the wave of new cards which are mentioned everywhere with the superlatives like incredible price/performance and performance/watt ratio. Your first idea how to upgrade Radeon X1950 Pro have to be Radeon HD 3850 256 MB. You can have this card for 180 USD:

Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 256 MB was the first card we reviewed, nowadays you can obtain for similar prices for example PowerColor or Gigabyte. Source: www.sapphiretech.com

But what if the game performance depends almost only on the graphic card? In such case you could be thinking (or dreaming?) about more expensive GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB. This upgrade should be enough for longer period:

Leadtek's Extreme version has higher clocks, higher price and more shining Bioshock sticker on the cooler than common version which we tested. Source: www.octeam.fr

But now we're talking about the investment about 270 USD and therefore we have to prove if such upgrade is necessary. We focused on the resolution 1680 × 1050 px and we tested wide palette of games. We will show the impact of anti-aliaisng and anisotropic filtering and in the many games you will see the performance in 1280 × 1024 and 1920 × 1200 px too. And if you think that the fps is going up and down with some graphic cards more than with others, we also have the propriate graphs for you: we created the graphs with fps in every second for Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, Heroes of Might and Magic V and Medal of Honor: Airborne.

1. Motivation of the test2. Tested cards and testbed3. 3DMark064. Bioshock5. Call of Duty 46. Company of Heroes7. Crysis8. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars9. Gothic 3 a Half-Life 2: Lost Coast10. Heroes of Might and Magic V11. Lost Planet12. Medal of Honor: Airborne13. Serious Sam 214. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory15. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion16. The Witcher17. Tomb Raider: Legend18. Unreal Tournament 319. World in Conflict20. Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering impact, power consumption21. Summary, verdict

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