Legacysystem wrote on 2026-07-17, 12:14:
Working HD 6950 on this board is interesting
Have you tried any games with it for performance assesment? Because 775DUAL-VSTA contains PCI-E x4 slot instead x16
I havent made any benchmarks about the card, but i use it actively to actually play games on it once in every week.
I dont play AAA games, i play indie and B class games on it, which are still running on core2quad systems without an issue, although 4gb ram starting to get a little small.
So i am actually playing games, sometimes using the computer to test hardware i am getting if it works, and i don't really measuring the things with this motherboard.
I rarely do benchmarking on this motherboard, because modern graphics cards refuse to start up in it. I use it as more like a retro daily driver system, for actual use, rather than a toy to do benchmarks.
But in short, the 6950 card in it is multiple times faster, under every task, than my agp 3850 or pci-e 3850.
In some titles its only 2x faster, in else, its easily 10x faster.
Its 10x faster especially in the titles where the half gb vram of the 3850 is not enough, and the performance fells drastically due to lack of vram.
2x faster is the usual for the most games, and there are games which are only 30-50% faster due to the limited cpu performance -
(or maybe due to the various weakness of the chipset, including the pci-e bandwidth and memory bandwidth isetlf).
This via chipset is limited to PCI-E x4 because the chipset wouldn't even able saturate the bandwidth of PCI-E x8 even if VIA wanted to.
This chipset can't even saturate dual channel ddr2-666 in real world applications.
Most of the motherboards using this chipset is limited to ddr2-533 dual channel out of the box (and setting it to higher results in system instability), in the 775dual-vsta you can force it to 666, but no change in actual performance if you do so.
The chipset and motherboard has lower than usual performance, just like every hybrid motherboards, meant to bridge the gap between generations, they not meant to break benchmarking records.
The pci-e x4 bandwidth is approximately equal to this chipset's single threaded memory writing capability.
I am sure a better chipset with better ram handling, better overall bandwidth, pci-e x8 or x16, better fsb capabilities, with the ability to run the cpu clock at full speed, and so on, would help the 6950 to reach far more performance.
Or more precisely, i would say, the pci-e x4, the chipsets raw performance, the memory bandwidth, and the cpus performance, all hitting the wall at the same time. So the pci-e x4 is not out of ordinary here.
The relatively weak performance of the system is caused by factors combined, but even so, yeah, you can put a 6950 into the system, you will get quite a nice speed uplift.
