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PowerColor Radeon X1900 GT 256MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 14 June 2006 |
Guru3D shares a review on the PowerColor Radeon X1900 GT 256MB PCIe graphics card. Roughly 3 weeks ago ATI released yet another graphics card onto the market that comes from the successful Radeon X1K series of graphics cards. It's targeted at the high-end segment yet in the lower price range and is being positioned against NVIDIA's GeForce 7900 GT. We'll be peeking at the rather lovely Radeon X1900 GT from PowerColor, a 12-pipe mid-range product based on the R580 silicon. The card features 36 pixel shaders and 8 vertex shaders yet has been massively castrated to only 12 pixel pipelines. The product offers upto three times the performance of the Radeon X1600 PRO, yet carries a pricetag of sub $299.
 PowerColor Radeon X1900 GT 256MB PCI-E Review
The Radeon X1900 GT is of course a product of the latest Radeon X1K family of ATI GPU's. The Radeon X1900 GT series is priced at a great $300. This new graphics card is running at a tact frequency of 575MHz accompanied with it's memory running at 1.2 GHz. Speaking about memory, it's GDDR3 memory and there's 256MB of it. I would not be shocked to see the GT work with an XT BIOS, why ? Because this is the same chip with a couple of things disabled. It looks like this products come from the same product line. So, it's the same chip yet is has less pixel pipelines and shader processors active.
Just like ATI's concentrated Radeon X1800 part, the Radeon X1800 GTO, the Radeon X1900 GT incorporates the full feature set of the R580 architecture. It however has one internal unit disabled. This means that the number of pixel pipelines in this part is reduced to twelve, which also leaves the core with 36 pixel shader units compared to 48 on a full Radeon X1900. Despite being effectively de-activated from the pixel pipelines in this chip, the number of texture units in the Radeon X1900 GT is also reduced to twelve compared to sixteen on a full R580 core.
Cutting down the pipeline in half will have a tremendous effect on performance, something that the 36 pixel shader units will have to make up for. The number of vertex processors remains the same though. So, this product is close to the Radeon X1800 GTO, yet with some more horsepower under the hood in the form of pixel processors. The PowerColor X1900 GT is equipped with 256MB 256-bit memory. It comes with Samsung memory rated at 1.4ns to be precise. Meaning that this memory can be pushed higher than it's default clocks for sure. Something good to know for who loves some overclocking.
The Radeon X1900 GT is a really fun product to own and for the money it's offering really good performance. It's a weird product though as for some reason it does not feel well balanced from a certain perspective. So in your more regular games where there's not a lot of pixel shading going on the card will perform good, yet in the higher segment of mid-range. Once a game starts utilizing pixel shaders, that's where the 36 pixel processors kick in and boost performance. So that's just a bit hard to describe. None the less the quality and performance of the product is awesome.
The PowerColor Radeon X1900 GT is a reference based upto the MHz precisely, it does offer really nice overclockability to squeeze even more performance out of it, yet it does get really hot under that hood. Whether you choose the Radeon X1800 XT or this product is a bit of a trade off. Now if this GT would be available in a 512MB edition, that would be really interesting. Look at the simply things like dual slot cooling or even the best bargain you can find. Perhaps that'll make the choice easier for you.
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