Power and Noise

The heatsink on both Jetway cards is very standard affair, a small aluminum extrude with fins and a noisy fan, not exactly the best of solutions:



When powered on the fan runs at full speed, all the time. (Ambient: 37.8dBa) At close range with open side panel we measured 68.2dBA, at 100cm this dropped down to 55.6dBA, with side panel closed it was 48.7dBA. In short: very noticeably and high pitched noise, if Jetway wants people to like these cards inside their machine, they need to change to a quieter HSF solution.

By using GDDR4 it is said you need less voltage to power the chips, lets measure overall system usage while putting the VGA card under high load using ATI Tool’s “scan for artifacts” function:



Only ~2Watt difference… wasn’t expecting much more though, as it’s the VGA’s core which eats the most power, the memory modules are satisfied with much less. At idle the difference was none-existent.

Overclocking: We can quite brief about our overclocking attempts, using ATI Tool (and selecting driver level overlocking) we tried to increase the memory speed on the GDDR3 sample, more than a few % increase we did not see, the core pretty much behaved the same, the GDDR3 unit was no good overclocker at all. The GDDR4 memory refused to clock any higher than the value shown in ATI Tool, being 800Mhz. The GPU did better, reaching a respectable 640Mhz, ~11% increase over stock. Seeing as we have pre-production sample of the GDDR4 in our hands, overclocking numbers are not really that trustworthy.

Conclusive Thoughts

The performance difference between the GDDR3 and GDDR4 is irrelevant in the end, what is relevant is whether or not the X1950 Pro as a previous mid-range video card is still worth buying now, with other options available.



Pricing of the Jetway X1950 Pro GDDR3 512Mb is competitive at €149, besting the nearest NVIDIA offer by ~€30 (Sparkle 8600 GTS 256Mb), no price is public yet for the GDDR4 version, don’t expect it to be cheaper though. But wait… isn’t there a 256Mb version of the X1950 Pro? Jetway has one at an amazing price of €119, the NVIDIA equivalent at that price is the 8600GT which is nowhere near the X1950 Pro performance wise. Do you need the extra 256Mb? Is the 512Mb version that much better? Truth is that you’ll hit a GPU bottleneck before you will see a performance decrease due to lack of video memory.

We find it hard to recommend the Jetway Radeon X1950 Pro GDDR4 512Mb to anyone at a price most likely higher than €149. However we do think its smaller and slightly (oh so slightly ~5%) slower brother, the Jetway Radeon X1950 Pro GDDR3 256Mb is quite the steal and rightly deserves a recommendation from us for anybody looking to build a mid-range gaming system. The X1950 Pro proves it still capable of running the latest games, with high detail, as long as you stick to medium resolutions (1024x768 ~ 1280x1024).

Jetway Radeon X1950 Pro GDDR3 256Mb @ €119
Recommended for



The Jetway Radeon X1950 Pro GDDR4 grabbed our attention with its commendable performance in today’s latest games, but the price of the 256Mb GDDR3 version is just too good to recommend any other edition, as the performance differences are too small.

We thank Dollarshops for allowing us to test drive these Jetway products, until next time.