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Diamond Viper X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 18 April 2006 |
Motherboards brings us a
review on the Diamond Viper
X1900 XTX 512MB PCIe graphics card. The first press release from Diamond had them promise to
deliver Stealth and Viper graphics cards based on chipsets from both NVIDIA and ATI. The first cards to come out of
the new company were based upon ATI's Radeon X800 cards. Today Diamond has made a comeback
with video cards on all of ATI's
current chips and they will enter the sound card and other markets as well.
Unfortunately for ATI the Radeon
X1800 was late, which forced ATI
to make a painful choice with their refresh of that card, the R580. Today I'm
looking at the Diamond
Viper X1900 XTX card.
 Diamond Viper X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E Review
The Diamond Viper X1900 XTX is identical to ATI's reference card. The Radeon X1900 XTX is a dual slot video card, with the length of the card the same as the ATI card. In fact, the card has an ATI logo on the cooling fan and Ruby on the heatsink. The heatsink covers the entire card with the exception of the very rear, including the memory chips. The rear of the card has a lot in common with other Radeon X1900 XTX cards. There is a 6-pin power connector to provide power for the graphics card as a high-end card like the Radeon X1900 XTX requires more power than the PCI Express slot can provide.
The Radeon X1900 differs from the previous high-end in having 48 pixel shader processors. This triples the number of shading power compared to the Radeon X1800 XT. Games are getting more and more shader intensive and the increase in pixel shaders should give an advantage in games like Oblivion and Stalker due later this year. The number of outputted pixels is the same as the Radeon X1800 series, namely 16 in total. The Radeon X1900 XTX has 8 vertex shaders, meaning that the card is capable of over a billion vertices a second theoretically.A key feature includes the support Shader Model 3.0.
Diamond has done a wonderful job with their Radeon X1900 XTX card, in that the card is an ATI reference card through and through. Virtually every Radeon X1900 XTX manufacturer has followed ATI's reference design for the Radeon X1900 XTX cards, in PCB layout, cooling, even down to having Ruby on the heatsink. The clock speed on the Diamond card is exactly the same as the Gigabyte, ASUS and ATI cards. The Diamond Viper X1900 XTX can be bought for about $499, the same as NVIDIA's GeForce 7900 GTX and in-line with the retail prices of other ATI Radeon X1900 XTX cards.
If you're in the market for a high-end video card today, the Radeon X1900 XTX of any flavor is a great choice, as the card is the fastest, most feature-rich available. Add to that the fact that there are few, if any, GeForce 7900 GTX's on the market at the moment, and the choice between the two is pretty clear.
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