I would rather get a X1950 Pro/XT or whatever decent AGP card you can find for cheap than dealing with the shitty early Crossfire implementation, microstuttering is present even to this day... plus with X1600 it's only possible with PCIe, which wouldn't be too great either

d1stortion wrote:

I would rather get a X1950 Pro/XT or whatever decent AGP card you can find for cheap than dealing with the shitty early Crossfire implementation, microstuttering is present even to this day... plus with X1600 it's only possible with PCIe, which wouldn't be too great either

Maybe I just won't bother, seems like throwing good money after bad.
Any clue what, if anything, the following components would fetch?

Gigabyte dual proc board
4gb ecc ram ddr 2100
2 athlon mp 2400
radeon x1600

My guess is hoping for $100 is extremely optimistic, and I should have sold it back in '08 when it might have gotten that much. Probably not worth anything these days.

If I could update the bios to support 8gb of ecc and modern HDs, and find a cheap 4670 agp card, it might be worth keeping around as a media center, but even then I don't know.

If that board still has good caps etc. I wouldn't sell it or throw it away. $100 would be an outrageous price for this kind of hardware, these ain't no collectors items yet 😉 (wonder if they will ever be). If you can fetch a X1950XT for 10 bucks this thing should be able to run games like Oblivion. Maybe not UT3 though, I hated it on my Pro 🙄

I picked up a X1950 XTX for $30 around a year ago. It does run Oblivion pretty well at even 1920x1200. It is also worth noting that the blower on the X850/X1800/X1900 is annoying and that the X1950XTX has a quieter cooler.

It's a shame AMD canned driver support way back in ~2009 because these cards would still play the PS360 ports. But the drivers are broken for too many games now. For example Skyrim and Hard Reset are messed up. Skyrim has the same problem (shadow issue) on 3870 and X1900 actually!

I do have a X1600 Pro at work just doing Windows Aero duties. Those cards are quite slow. Too little fillrate. Back in their day it was smarter to go for the older X800 cards because they blow X1600 away and were around the same price.

I wanted to get the XTX myself at some point, but then considered that just a 8800 GT is 25-50% faster than it depending on the game.

My Pro has an Arctic Cooling solution on it which is super quiet, but UT3, which came out just a year after this mid-high end card, runs just too sluggish. 30-40 FPS on 1280x1024 and this game seems to be particularly sensitive when it comes to low frame rates, making it hard to aim. Considering that PS3 and 360 have similar graphics chips (I know, they have custom additions and no DX restrictions to them) and run the game probably more fluently it goes to show how much better the optimization is on consoles.

I've seen videos on the newest Halos, Killzones etc. and they look quite amazing, PC hardware of this vintage would never be capable of something like this...

I remember the X1950 Pro fondly as it was one of the cheapest cards capable of playing Oblivion at 1280x1024 maxed out at 30 fps back in 2006 (still have one in my collection).

Of course, you could have an X1900XTX or 8800GTX which were godly, but being top of the line cards, you paid wallet evaporating prices for that distinction.

Also, I agree too that the X1600 cards are underwhelming, as are 6600GTs (even SLI'ed). No point going with them anymore. I'd say 8800GTs are the all round best card for XP era gaming.

You know, I'm not even sure what the hell I was thinking when I asked that, since there is only one AGP slot in an AGP motherboard, anyway.
Shame I didn't snag a 4670 when they were on clearance for $50.
Oh well thanks for those that responded, maybe I'll try and find a cheap x1950 pro.

I went from an unlocked Radeon 9500 non-Pro to a x1650 Pro and it was the biggest video card upgrade mistake I ever made. The x1650 ran all my older games fine with higher settings than the 9500 was capable of, but the games that were just coming out at the time were mostly a no go even at low settings. The x1000 cards apart from the x1800/x1900 cards really weren't good gamers.