What Lies Beneath? Uncovered...

Time to dig a bit deeper, and see what lies beneath the new cooling system of the PowerColor Radeon X1950 XTX graphics accelerator. 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 underneath, with proper handling the heatsink can be removed for what ever reasons. We don't recommend it however.

Once the screws have been removed, the heatsink can be taken of and the full scale PCB sees the light. I must admit I was a bit surprised as the main weight of the Radeon X1950 XTX comes from the cooling solution alone. Most electronic components have been invisible from the start on the front side of the PCB. Only some smaller components were not covered by the heatsink. All other main components like the GPU, voltage regulators and memory chips however can only be seen once the cooling solution was taken off.

The PowerColor Radeon X1950 XTX is powered by the R580+ series line of graphics processors, set at 650MHz clock speed. The R580+ version on the Radeon X1950 XTX is physically the same chip as the one used on the Radeon X1900 XTX and XT released earlier. The R580+ chip uses a 90nm manufacturing process for its high performance circuits, which eradicate limitations with both frequencies and higher heat dissipations. Notice as well that the GPU die is protected against damage with a traditional metal frame.

	Radeon X1950 XTX	Radeon X1900 XTX
Core Speed	650MHz	650MHz
Memory Speed	2.00GHz	1.55GHz
Memory Size	512MB GDDR4	512MB GDDR3
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit
Pixel Shaders	48	48
Vertex Shaders	8	8
HDCP Support	Yes	Optional

The Radeon X1950 XTX shares the same full 512-bit internal, 256-bit external ring bus memory controller just as the Radeon X1900 series. This quite advanced ring bus technology that ATI developed within the R580+ core comes with a great memory bandwidth that can be used to process a substantial amount of data. With the Radeon X1900 XTX however this didn't came to it full potential due to the use of GDDR3 memory, and due to that the Radeon X1900 XTX couldn't release all the power it was capable of processing and generating.

The PowerColor Radeon X1950 XTX comes with eight memory chips in total which are all located on the front side of the board. The memory chips are placed strategically around the R580+ core. Each of these memory chips gives their heat away to the coolers copper sole via elastic rubber-like thermal pads. By cooling the memory chips on their own, it provides extra protection towards the lifetime of the chips in general.

In total the PowerColor Radeon X1950 XTX features 512MB GDDR4 memory which is running at 2.0GHz, following the reference settings by ATI. In essence that would mean that some decent 1.0ns memory chips would be just fine for the job. However since ATI has opted for faster GDDR4 Samsung memory chips. These Samsung GDDR4 chips come marked as 0.9ns access time and are therefore rated at 2.2GHz frequency and operating at 1.8V. Being set at only 2.0GHz this leaves some margin for some overclocking...

Just to the left of the R580+ core we have the ATI Rage Theater chip, which we haven't seen before as is was covered by the massive cooler. The ATI Rage Theater chip provides the Radeon X1950 XTX with various video capabilities enhanced by the Avivo technology. Well that's about it on the insights of the PowerColor Radeon X1950 XTX graphics card, I guess it is time to put this one to work and show some of the performance figures. So we will just reassemble it again, applying some new thermal compound and stick it into our test system.