I could have sworn I read some posts by some people with pro’s saying 9.8 was working for them, maybe they were on PCI-e or were running the xt or xtx cards. I am on AGP. The x1950xt has a physically different core and better rated memory so that appears to still be driver supported (but for how long?).
After researching some more I have found out the following:
X1950 pro is about 3 times faster than an X850 pro. Similar in speed to an Nvidia 8600GT, actually a bit faster in the games that were tested but seems very slightly slower (by 5%) in benchmarks for some reason.
Sapphire’s X1950pro’s appear to be the only ones fitted with GDDR3 1.2ns memory which is rated to run at 800mhz (ddr 1600 mhz) with some people being able to get a little more out of it.
The Sapphire “x1950pro ultimate” apparently had GDDR4 fitted to it or so I read. Wonder if it was typo since that memory according to the reviewer was also rated at 800mhz. According to the single review that I saw the guy couldnt overclock the mem at all but did claim a GPU overclock of 648. One guy posted that he couldnt get over 600 on his ultimate GPU but got 823 on his mem.
So far as I can tell ALL other X1950pro’s from other manufacturers were fitted with GDDR3 1.4ns memory which was rated to run at 700 mhz hence why some cannot overclock their memory significantly (if at all) beyond 700 mhz.
The drawback of the Sapphire card is that it has digital voltage regulators i.e. you cannot up the voltage. Even editing/flashing the BIOS has no affect in upping the volts
Some Asus models can be physically volt modded if you are into electronics or you can try a BIOS mod on those. There were a few people claiming 641 on the GPU and up to 780 on the mem (which I presume was from extra voltage).
Shame I cannot give my card more juice because I am pretty sure you could get a little more out of it but having said that I found further gains were relatively small.
BIOS volt mod should work on other manufacturers cards although there is never a guarantee of a higher overclock. Do so at your own risk. Watch out for heat problems, get an after market cooler (unless you are using the Sapphire Ultimate – which has a good cooler) and increase the fan speeds. Good case cooling may help since the Accelero cooler doesnt blow hot air out of the case like earlier arctic coolers.
A couple of people with the same (Sapphire) card as mine, one on AGP and one on PCI-E both report their top stable GPU clock was 621 which is the same as my top stable oc so perhaps that is the tops for my card (although I note from an earlier post one lucky chap said he was getting 645 on his Sapphire GPU, but was it tested as stable?! )
I did read a post where one guy was claiming to be able to get 665 stable on his watercooled Sapphire pro but there were two or three discrepancies in his post which made me doubt the truth of what he was saying. There are very few posts that I have seen of people claiming to have gotten over 641 stable on the GPU. One review suggested that the ATI reference board has an engineering limit of 648 on the GPU and I had suspected it was around 650 anyway after my card blacked out when I experimented with a 651 overclock.
There is no over clocking software which fully supports the x1950pro (I’m not sure if its the same with the xt or xtx since they have a different/better core and memory) but I am using ATI Tray Tools since I like the extra options (overdrive isnt particularly good, has limitations and in fact seems to be disabled on a number of X1950pro’s anyway). I have to keep the AI option on high for my chosen D3D and OGL options to “stick” in Tray Tools. I miss not having support for tweaking memory timings (I spent much time tweaking the mem timings on my X850. In fact I still have it and will throw in 1gig of DDR400 mem and an overclocking sheet if anyone out there is interested, it has an arctic cooler fitted – I dont want much for it – offers anyone?).
Apparently ATI Tool (not to be confused with ATI Tray Tools) can be patched to allow tweaking of memory timings so I am gonna try getting that to work.
My overclock (from 580/702 to 621/816) has given me a 12.5% increase under the ATI Tray Tools benchmark. I have had to extensively test (playing games basically) to ensure those settings were stable since the artifact scanning option doesnt work in Tray Tools (having said that I did get it to work once but only once). Higher clocked settings on the face of it seem stable for a while but it usually crashes back into windows after a bit.
Took me some time to research all this. Probably would have been quicker to upgrade my PC lol. This appears to be the only X1950pro thread still going although I dont anticipate being able to add much else to it apart from perhaps reporting back on my memory timings success or failure. Hope someone finds this info useful particularly since it is likely more overclocking info than you will find in any other single thread about this card.
(1-2fps)
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