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Strengths: underrated stock bus speeds. very capable on an agp system with fast cpu, tight memory timings, and high amp PSU. "hobbyist" grade hardware for those who enjoy the journey as much as the destination.
Weaknesses: the card's current draw requires a high amperage power supply. XFX cut corners with the stock cooler. quality after market cooling is required. unfortunately no coolers are made specifically for it
Summary: This card is a gem. It's often on sale/rebate and is currently the second best PCIE-on-AGP hybrid offering from XFX in the nVidia line. This card doesn't come with the premium price of the top performing 7950gt, but it's got plenty of potential and can exceed the price/performance ratio of the 7950gt (and ATI x1950XT).
As with any logic designed for the PCI-E interface, this card expects a lot of amperage from the +12v rail(s) of the system power supply. The AGP interconnect provides far less current to the card than it needs. It is imperative that you have a high amperage PSU with 10-20 amps to spare for the card itself. Make sure to use the included Molex 4-pin breakout cable and plug 2 separate power cables into the video card. Alternatively, a single cable may be used if your PSU has multiple +12v rails and you can provide a dedicated supply of a dozen or more amps. The high current demand prevents many aging AGP systems from being able to even POST with this card.
Assuming you can meet the power requirements, the key to unlocking the performance of this card is finding a quality after market vga heat sink/fan. The stock solution is audaciously ill-designed. Zalman all-copper 700 series vga coolers from mwave are exceptional but require tapping an additional hole or widening one of the pre-drilled holes in the mounting bracket. The Zalman 900 model may have more mounting configurations, but it does not specifically support the card either.
It should be noted that there are 8 vga memory chips and a 9th chip near the AGP interconnect that is the HSI PCI-E to AGP bridge. It may be worth buying a spare package of vga memory heat sinks as most after market products only contain 8.
Once your cooler is installed you will be very pleased with the headroom available in the clock frequency of the core bus. This chip can easily be overclocked from stock 450mhz to 600mhz and remain at 40C idle and under 60C during load. The memory bus on the card is far less overclockable, and in practice does not give appreciable real world performance increase with the headroom provided by the average heat sinks available for vga memory cooling.
Most systems will not experience a real world 3d performance detriment due to the 256 megabyte limit in vga memory. This card, and more importantly the older cpu/fsb/ddr1 subsystems the AGP card will interface with, cannot provide the bandwidth needed to take advantage of more than 256 megabytes of scene rendering and still be playable at any kind of enjoyable frame rate.
That being said there is more than enough power available to provide acceptable frame rates in 3d gaming resolutions up to 1920x1080 with anti-aliasing disabled. Resolutions between 1280 and 1600 seem to be the sweet spot, and judicious use of FSAA is available. The card can run 16x anisotropic filtering with LOD clamp and high quality filtering and maintain frame rate.
nVidia now properly supports the card and the other PCI-E on AGP cards with the latest Forceware driver sets. You do not need to be worried about old forum threads concerning the lack of driver support for these cards. The card is compatible with the nTune software suite from nVidia for over clocking and temperature/fan monitoring.
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