Test System Setup

Processor(s): Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.33GHz (366MHz x 9 and FSB 1:1)

Motherboard(s): ABIT IN9 32X-MAX Wi-Fi (Supplied by Universal ABIT)

Memory: 2 X 1GB Crucial PC8000 5-5-5-15 (Supplied by Crucial)

Hard Disk(s): Hitachi 80GB 7200RPM SATA 2

Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2

Drivers: ATI Catalyst 7.2 and DX9c

As mentioned the main idea of this review is to find out how both these graphics cards stack up considering they share the exact same clock speeds except once has twice as much onboard memory as the other.

Both operate at clock speed of 500/1200MHz and the only difference between them is that the Palit utilizes an extra 256MB of memory to bring it up to 512MB.

At the time of writing and in Australia, the Sapphire X1950GT 256MB will cost you around $240 AUD (roughly $188 USD) whereas the Palit X1950GT 512MB will cost you around $270 AUD (roughly $211 USD) - a little over a 11% difference in price. While it's all well and nice to have the extra memory and you'll probably see performance improvement in certain games and applications at high resolutions, if you're running lower resolutions, we might be onto a better product here in the 256MB version.

Let's check it out and find out! We'll test at default clock speeds and then later on overclock and see what type of added performance that brings.

3DMark05

Version and / or Patch Used: Build 130

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark05/

Buy It Here

3DMark05 is now the second latest version in the popular 3DMark "Gamers Benchmark" series. It includes a complete set of DX9 benchmarks which tests Shader Model 2.0 and above.

For more information on the 3DMark05 benchmark, we recommend you read our preview here.

While it's not huge we can see across the board that the 512MB version is slightly faster.