Second X1950pro worth it?

[BigCharb]

SUP, a friend wants to sell me his X1950pro to me for 200 dollars so that I will be able to get xFire. Is it worth it? Will I gain performance increases in the games I play? I play BF2142, DOOM3, GRAW, Tomb raider and sometimes Half-life.

Thanks L8er

 

[prozac26]

You can get it for less than $200.

It's worth it at higher resolutions and have AF and AA turned up, then it'll help.

What resolution do you play at?

 

[Assman]

if he meant $200 CAD than it's ok

 

[Dr_asik]

Bleh, unless you're living on heaps of shiny gold pieces, 200$ is a lot of money for the good a second X1950Pro would do to your system. That used card is not even significantly cheaper than what you get brand new on the canadian market, with the ASUS X1950Pro available for less than 220$ on NCIX and DirectCanada.com. Either persuade him to make a better offer or just save the money for a future, much more meaningful upgrade. I'd choose the second option.

 

[Blackhawk44M]

First off I OWN 2 of these cards in the ATI flavor and the new CF interconnect that can move 10 bits 2 WAYS really makes the 1950pro scale better than anything befor and it is about time.I'm wondering how the higher end Nv cards would do with 2 bridges , I mean it is needed , look at the GTS then the GTX.It just makes more sense to go CF with these than any other card but not with the 320MB GTS being SO cheap.Man it is hard to be an ATi fanboy right now.I'm mad get us our 2900xtx's

 

[techgeek]

Depends, is $50 dollars less than new a good deal. I can find the X1950Pro 256MB for $250 and the 512MB version for $270 (you didn't mention which you had or which he is offering). With budget DX10 cards coming from nVidia and ATI (supposed to release the whole spectrum at once), I don't know if I would do it. Unless you have a real hard-on for running CrossFire, I would hold off. The fact is if you can't get a DX10 card in your price range in a couple of months, you always have the option of going for it then (even if your buddy sells his card to someone else) and it will probably cost you the same for a new card.

 

[ecosoft]

What's with the price? Here's Newegg's offering for $165 Radeon X1950PRO 256MB 256-bit GDDR3

 

[TonyStark]

In terms of Performance: 2 PROs are better than an XTX. (According to this.)

$200 for a second hand PRO is too much though, especially from a "friend".

 

[BigCharb]

oh, mix feed back. i thought that it was a good price, at the local future shop they have it for 300 bucks. i play at 1280x1024 in all my games. i will try to talk him down, is 150 good? the card is 256mb card from ATI, not MSI or Sapphire. i plan to move to a wide screen later on and i know that my present card wont have the horsepower i will need. in BF2142 i play everything on max but only 4xAA, my card wont go any higher; i think its catalyst holding me back. Doom i play high, ultra high and it tells me that i need 512mb of graphics memory.

thanks for the feed back

 

[techgeek]

I used Memory Express (www.memoryexpress.com) for my pricing (I'm out west), I assume pricing should be comparable out east. Mind you I just checked out NCIX and they're asking too much for those cards. The cards I looked at are Sapphire and HIS, they didn't have any ATI built in the X1950 Pro cards. If you could get him down to $150, that would be a deal worth going for, maybe even $175. Remember with a new card you get an new warranty.

As to the poster asking what gives with the pricing, we are Canadian, so we are talking CAD not USD. Not to mention NewEgg doesn't ship to Canada .

I didn't notice until I posted this that your pricing was coming from FutureScrap. I shop there a lot, but not for computer parts (at least not anymore). They are just too expensive for that kind of stuff. Every once in awhile, they have a good sale on computer parts, but their good sales usually only lower their price down to matching that of Memory Express.

 

[BigCharb]

yeah, i think i will be able to get him down to 175. its a shame that newegg doesn't ship to Canada, if they did they would make lots of money. any ideas if the second card will help be get 8xAA in BF2142?

Thanks

 

[techgeek]

You said you don't even have the option to select 8X? Or is it that the performance is too bad to play at minumum fps? If it's the latter, you may see enough of a performance boost. I am not familiar with the BF2/142 series games so I can't give you a definitive answer. It may be a limitation of the amount of RAM your card has keeping you from enabling 8X AA. In which case the second card will not help. As you know running two cards in CrossFire doesn't double the amount of video RAM, so to the game it will look like a multi-GPU card with 256MB of RAM even though each card has 256MB. Again I can't give you the answer here, maybe someone with this card and game combo could way in with some advice or first hand information.

 

[zenmaster]

Sell him your card, then get yourself an 8800 for the money he gives u plus what you would have spent.

 

[TonyStark]

Sell him your card, then get yourself an 8800 for the money he gives u plus what you would have spent.

Haha, word. I'm thinking of doing that myself as I have a x1950pro. But with the R600 around the corner, I'm not sure if I should grab an 8800 now or wait for the Dragons-Head. 8)

 

[BigCharb]

i set in the video settings to 8x but after i apply it automatically resets to 4x. i think with 2 cards i will be able to run it at 8x. i will buy the card and then sell my rig in September and build a new one, i know that with a dual card setup i will have what i need to run all the games i play on high settings.

P.S. in doom i get 50FPS and in BF2142 i get 45FPS and in HL2 i get 47FPS, the second card should increase my FPS's by at least 5 frames.

L8er

 

[stefx]

i thought that it was a good price, at the local future shop they have it for 300 bucks.

Never use Future Shop or other store chain to benchmark a price in Canada. Instead Check out ncix.com for example.