Introduction

The Jetway company name might not ring a bell with many people, but it’s possible you have seen or even owned one of their products. Jetway is a large manufacturers responsible for providing other vendors with their hardware, this include NVIDIA and ATI video cards. Not so long ago Jetway has been more aggressively pushing their own product lines, and today we have their latest ATI card in for test.

Dollarshops did not send us the HD 2xxx series, but rather the previous generation X1950 Pro card. What count warrant another look at this mid-range DX9 video card as we already tested two of them here? Jetway has come up with a custom design X1950 Pro model, fitting it with GDDR4 memory chips.



GDDR4 in the box

Where as the standard X1950 Pro from Jetway comes with 512Mb GDDR3 memory clocked at 600 (1200Mhz DDR), the GDDR4 version has higher clocks speeds, Rivatuner displays the memory running at 800Mhz ( 1600Mhz DDR) while first specifications seen at Cebit had it clocked higher at 2200Mhz.

GPU core wise Rivatuner gave these values:

X1950 Pro GDDR3: 575Mhz

X1950 Pro GDDR4: 570Mhz

The GDDR4 unit we received is one of the first pre-production samples in existence, which might explain the different specs. The sample did not come in a box, but if it were, included goodies are the same as the Jetway GDDR3 edition:

Manual & Drivers CD

4-pin Y-splitter

S-Video Out Cable

VGA->DVI connector

Let’s take a closer look ->

Up close and Comparison GDDR3<>GDDR4

Dollarshops was kind enough to send over the standard X1950 Pro GDDR3 512Mb version to include in our comparison.

The differences are quite noticeable:



The PCB layout is completely different between the two boards, both sport a 4-pin molex power connector instead of the 6-pin PCIe which most PCIe VGA cards now have.

At the backside you can more clearly make out which parts were moved about the PCB to make room and accommodate the GDDR4 memory chips:



The GPU on both cards is identical:



The memory, of course, not quite. The GDDR3 sample has these chips:



At the Infineon site these HYB18H512321AF-13 chips are not listed, the HYB18H512321AF-12 are 800Mhz chips, the HYB18H512321AF-14 are 700Mhz, leading us to believe the HYB18H512321AF-13 fit somewhere in the middle. Jetway configured them to run at 600Mhz (value obtained through Rivatuner/ATI Tool).

The X1950 Pro with GDDR4 has Samsung chips:



These K4U52324QE-BC09 are rated on the Samsung site at 1100Mhz (2200Mhz DDR); either Rivatuner and ATI Tool are incorrectly reading the memory speed at 800Mhz, or these chips are underclocked.

Let’s find out if there is a performance difference between the two X1950 Pro cards ->

Test Setup

Intel Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 E6400 @ 2.8Ghz (from CSMSA)
Cooling	Coolermaster Hyper TX
Mainboard	Intel 975X Bad Axe (Modded by Piotke)
Memory	2 * 1Gb PC6400 OCZ
Other	Antec Performance One P182 Case Antec TruePower Trio! 650W Western Digital 74Gb Raptor SATA HDD

Synthetic Benchmarks

Let’s start out with some Futuremark benchmarks to estimate the performance difference in games:



~1000 points in 3DMark2001SE, means that in old DX8 games you will see a slight benefit with the GDDR4 card.




400~500 difference in 3DMark03/05 is close to negligible, but it’s something.



The latest DX9 benchmark shows a ~250 score difference in favor of the X1950 Pro GDDR4 card. Time to find out what it means games ->

Game Benchmarks

We used FRAPS to monitor and record frame rates, we took down average and minimum values and display them in the charts below. The games’ detail settings and resolution and anti-aliasing are also mentioned.

We decided to use recently released games to see how a previous generation mid-range card will perform; manual shoot through (STALKER/Rainbow 6) and drive through (Colin McRae) were repeated several times to make sure we had consistent results.

We start of with the most graphic intense game first, Colin McRae DIRT demo. This racing game is arguably the best looking one on the PC right now. It’s extremely demanding in the GFX department even with AA is not used. At 1280x1024 (0xAA) with in-game detail set to high (except for motion blur) we got these results:



Stunning results really, this game is very demanding, any advantage had from the faster GDDR4 memory goes to waste as the X1950 Pro core struggles to keep up; while ~24 fps is not a slide-show yet, it comes close, frame drops to 16fps were quite noticeable. Decreasing in-game detail to medium settings increase average FPS to ~35 something and minimum fps to 27, surely more pleasant to play, but less beautiful too.

Difference between GDDR3 and GDDR4 in Colin McRae DIRT: 1.21%

Onto our first FPS shooter, Rainbox Six Las Vegas uses the Unreal 3 engine to display very fine looking scenes; the FRAPS run was done landing on the Las Vegas strip and making our way to the hotel, at 1280x960 (0xAA) results were higher than expected:



Once you try 1600x1200 the game becomes unplayable (min:17 avg: 26) but at this reduced resolution it remained quite pleasant still. Tweaking the in-game details a bit will allow you to reach 40~50FPS. As it stands with high detail, both cards remain over 30fps avg with dips to 22~24fps.

Difference between GDDR3 and GDDR4 in Rainbow Six Las Vegas: 3.30%

Last game benchmark is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. an open ended FPS shooter game with high resolution textures and open environment, dynamic day/night cycles and smart AI enemies. We ran through a section of the woods where the automatic camera takes over and swoops over a fire fight between army and stalkers, afterwards we run towards the fight and fire of a few shots. In-game resolution set at 1280x1024 (0xAA) with high detail:



This went surprisingly smooth, with averages reaching ~60FPS the game was very playable at this resolution; eagerly we switched to 1600x1200 (0xAA) but that proved too much for these cards (min: 21 / avg: 28.9). Still at the settings shown in the chart the game was beautiful to look at running with high detail and smooth sailing with min. fps never under 40. The GDDR4 card had the possibility to help the X1950 Pro flex its mid-range muscles and difference was larger.

Difference between GDDR3 and GDDR4 in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: 9.69%


Power Usage, Noise and Conclusive Thoughts next ->

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.