The Sapphire X1950 Pro AGP Guide
Installs, Troubles, Diagnosis
February 2007
A few days back I received the Sapphire X1950 Pro AGP card and installed it. Knowing that I have never much liked the ATI driver stuff I just installed the display driver and no other files. It took me a few tries and I finally got it working but not without some interesting problems. First of all you need to know that I bought this card for folding. Folding you ask.. well its a program that runs in the background and... well wait go here and read for yourself. They can explain it much better than I. In any case folding runs at 100 percent utilization of this cards GPU. That of course means it runs full out and I started getting worried about heat and such. I started reading around the internet about how this card performs and what problems others have had with it. BOY was I shocked when I found all the problems. Don't get me wrong though, now that I have it I love the card. Mine has run at full load for several days with no real problems. It is turning in folding work units at a rate of about 8.5 minutes per frame and that is extremely fast.
With all that said I will not be testing gaming on this card. I am not a gamer as I can't find time to do all the things I want to now so don't need any other projects. HOWEVER be advised that I will be loading this card 100% and that should tell you a lot about reliability.
The whole point of this writing is to outline the do's and don'ts of installing and maybe modifying these cards. I spent two entire days reading and found little bits of info scattered all over the net. I hope to write a guide here that will encompass all that I found out plus more that I am going to do and save others from having to hop all over the net looking for info. That will be my goal.
I have since decided to include any and all reviews of the card that I have read. You can take a look at these yourself. Some I agree with some I don't. Basically I just want to see what kinds of conclusions the others are coming up with. See the bottom left of this page. These are the reviews, there were also tons of forums that I read posts from people with this card. I got a lot of good information at sites like www.2cpu.com, the folding community, and a few others. Also note I have included my system specifications as some have emailed asking what I was running.
Now on to the start. There are three main problems with these cards. Power, heat, and drivers. I hope when I get done you will understand and save yourself a lot of time and money by following this advice. Lets start with the power problems continue with heat then finally the drivers. In the drivers section I will outline my utilities and attempts at over clocking. Because I am still working all the heat bugs out I will not be finished with either of these sections for a while. I will first get my card cool then worry about getting it to over clock.
Reviews of this card I found interesting:
Driverheaven.net LostCircuits.com Firingsquad.com HardwareZone.com
Last updated: 08/19/2010
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