Uncovered, Under the Hood

Indeed we are taking a look under the hood by pulling of the cooling solution. As you know by removing the cooling system you are voiding the warranty. For those who don't care about the warranty and want to see what's under the hood, with proper handling the heatsink can be removed for what ever reasons. We don't recommend it however. We are starting by removing the heatsink and by this uncovering the PowerColor Radeon X1600 PRO AGP.

Once the screws has been removed, the heatsink can be taken of and the full scale PCB sees the light. I must admit I was a bit surprised to find such a bare PCB underneath the heatsink. Most electronic components have been visible from the start on the front side of the PCB. Only some small resistors are covered by the heatsink, along with the core and somehow partly the memory chips.

A closer look at the front side of the Radeon X1600 PRO shows the main components, namely the RV530 core and the memory chips. Since the RV530 cores are native PCI Express chips we would have expected a Rialto bridge, which is needed to translate the PCI Express signals towards the AGP interface. And yes although it is not on the front of the PCB, it actually does feature such a bridge chip but it has been placed on the back of the board.

The PowerColor Radeon X1600 PRO is powered by the RV530 series line of graphics processors, set at 500MHz clock speed. The RV530 PRO version on the Radeon X1600 PRO is physically the same chip as the one used on the Radeon X1600 XT, but which didn't pass the XT criteria. The RV530 chip uses a 90nm manufacturing process for its high performance circuits, which eradicate limitations with both frequencies and higher heat dissipations.

Flipping the card around we can provide you a view on the PCB and the components located at the back of the card. This side is quite sober, though lists all the details of the card itself by means of the stickers used. As already mentioned the 512MB frame buffer is split up, with half of the memory chips on the front and half of them on the back of the board. Close to the AGP interface we find back a chip that comes covered with some special thermal protection.

We gently removed the protection, which feels kindly cold and its sole purpose is to somehow cool down the Rialto chip. Indeed, the Rialto chip found its place a the back of the card and will translate the PCI Express stream of information coming from the RV530 core towards the AGP interface. By placing the bridge chip on the back of the board, ATI has been able to reduce the size of the PCB on the Radeon X1600 PRO. This is quite new for ATI, to bridge one bus type to another and it adds some extra complexity to the manufacturing of the video cards.