1950XT and Asrock board

[tigersty1e]

So my board only has PCIE 4.0.

How much speed am I losing if I pair my system up with a 1950XT?

 

[butch84]

I've got the exact hardware you're proposing. My motherboard is the Dual VSTA (basically an earlier revision of your 4CoreDual VSTA) which also has a x4 pci-e slot. Before I took the plunge on the x1950xt, I read the following article:

http://www.tomshardware.com/20...ress_scaling_analysis/

Normally, I don't read Tom's Hardware. However, this article is pretty good. They tested performance scaling on an x1900xtx and an 8800GTS across x1, x4, x8, and x16 pci express speeds. To make a long story short, the x1900xtx didn't take too much of a hit even at x4 link, while the 8800GTS suffered pretty badly at anything but x16.

So, if you're thinking of getting an x1950xt, go for it! You'll take a slight performance hit from the x4 pci-e slot, but it'll still be a lot faster than your 6800. Hell, I came from a 6800GT (a bit faster than your 6800) and I noticed a huge performance improvement.

Cheers,
Dave

 

[tigersty1e]

Cool.

I'm taking the plunge on the 1950 xt and a 620HX.

I need to upgrade my PSU and I figure the 620HX will be able to go in my next build when I transition to Vista/DX10.


I'm trying to hold off on putting more money into my current system. How would I fare with only 1 MB of ram for games like BF2, COD2, FEAR, Half-LIFE 2 and possibly Rainbow 6 Vegas, Oblivion.

 

[Stumps]

From the testing I have done with my 4coredual and PCI-E cards (8800GTS and HD2900XT) you lose around 10% compared to a similar system with a full PCI-E X16 slot, I've noticed that the ATI card doesn't tend to be affected as badly as the Nvidia card.

I would recommend upgrading to 2GB of DDR2 for that setup...you can never have enougth ram these days.

 

[Sonikku]

Is it just me or does it sometimes feel like the abandoning of the 8x AGP slot and inflating of prices on the same cards was more a matter of getting you to buy a new motherboard AND a new video card and less a matter about bringing better performance to the masses a couple years ago?

 

[tigersty1e]

Originally posted by: Sonikku
Is it just me or does it sometimes feel like the abandoning of the 8x AGP slot and inflating of prices on the same cards was more a matter of getting you to buy a new motherboard AND a new video card and less a matter about bringing better performance to the masses a couple years ago?

Of course.

And PCI-E 2.0 will do the same thing.

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: Sonikku
Is it just me or does it sometimes feel like the abandoning of the 8x AGP slot and inflating of prices on the same cards was more a matter of getting you to buy a new motherboard AND a new video card and less a matter about bringing better performance to the masses a couple years ago?

that pretty much sums it up...although we will see Video cards that can take advantage of the bandwidth offered by PCI-E x16 in the future...but for now AGP 8x can still do the job quite well.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The biggest feature that SHOULD have been added to the PCI-E 2.0 specs, is a STANDARD approach for "steerable" PCI-E lanes. Thus, enabling CrossFire and SLI on ANY STANDARD PLATFORM.

It would have been easy to do, technically. I guess Intel didn't have the political will for it. Too bad, as it would have added a market feature to Intel's boards. Perhaps the issue is NV patents that prevent such a thing from being added. If that's true, then that's a sad state of affairs.