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ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB HDCP Ready Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 30 August 2006 |
The Radeon X1950 XTX is ATI's newest top-of-the-line graphics card aimed to become the new king of the hill, taking the hill from NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2. Something that might prove to be a challenge as the GeForce 7950 GX2 has two cores and double memory buses at its end. We will focus on a single graphics card as we are yet to take delivery of a master card. The Radeon X1950 XTX comes with two new features, a new cooler and new memory. Is the new cooler as good as it looks? Stay tuned as we take a closer look at both and check out how increased memory bandwidth really will affect the performance. But it is looking quite good at first sight.- NordicHardware
 ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB HDCP Ready Review
The ATI Radeon X1950 XTX house the same GPU as the Radeon X1900 XTX, more precise the transistor giant R580. Even if Radeon X1950 XTX is code-named R580+ which implies a change of the architecture this is not the case, if you neglect the GDDR4 updated memory controller. R580 is big but also a very powerful GPU which together with the improved bandwidth makes Radeon X1950 XTX the most powerful single-GPU graphics card available on the market. It's worth mentioning that the RAMDAC supports 10-bit colors all the way through the pipe, which results in a dramatic improvement of the color ratios.
The goal has been to deliver faster memories with lower power consumption. GDDR4 brings about 30% lower consumption than GDDR3 at the same frequency. Something they've been able to achieve thanks to a number of improvements of the communication and power consumption. The chip used with our Radeon X1950 XTX are made by Samsung and ranked at 0.90ns. They use 1.9V which is slightly lower than what we've seen with 1.1ns ranked GDDR3. The memory overclocks divinely at default voltage to about 2286MHz DDR, which is achieved without any fuss.
It's no news that overclocking has become something for the everyday user. Many graphics card partners even sell cards that are overclocked from factory, something that has more or less become a given with some partners or even their special niche. This is mainly with NVIDIA based graphics card but the Radeon X1950 XTX has all the potential to create the same trend at ATI partners because there is plenty of room for overclocking. The core of the Radeon X1950 has been overclocking better than the Radeon X1900 and the graphics card is fitted with a better cooler. The memory is should be foolproof from factory at 2200MHz.
Overclocking for use in a regular PC seven days a week is good with Radeon X1950 XTX, you can expect up to 700MHz core and 2200MHz memory completely stable. When it comes to extreme overclocking uses negative Celsius the future is more uncertain. ATI has done a really great job with its latest addition to the graphics card market and it is really just one detail that stops the card from being the fastest card today, its performance. The Radeon X1950 XTX is without a doubt the fastest single GPU graphics card on the market but it is still NVIDIA that has the fastest graphics card in the form of GeForce 7950 GX2.
What is perhaps the biggest advantage of the Radeon X1950 XTX is ATI's aggressive price. Yes indeed, $449 can hardly be considered cheap, but considering what a new high-end graphics card costs it actually quite affordable. The Radeon X1950 XTX can be preordered already at $449 while NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 costs about $550, a quite big difference. The Radeon X1950 XTX shows that the closest single GPU graphics card from NVIDIA, the GeForce 7900 GTX, is no match when it comes to the performance, even though NVIDIA's GeForce 7900 GTX is just a few tens cheaper.
The Radeon X1950 XTX is very much alike its predecessor but what ATI has improved has really paid off. The new cooler is a big step forward and the GDDR4 technology adds a significant performance advantage in most situations, which we presume will only become bigger when we take a look at the Radeon X1950 CrossFire. The Radeon X1950 XTX is not a revolutionizing graphics card but gives a very mature impression. But alas, there are pieces missing from the puzzle and the most important piece is, once again, the availability. The Radeon X1950 XTX is expected to appear in stores next month, expect price drops from NVIDIA.
Overall ATI has improved an already good graphics card and if it will be able to meet the demand while keeping its low prices Radeon X1950 XTX can look forward to a very bright future. At the same time we're very excited to see what the Radeon X1950 architecture with its GDDR4 memory can do in a CrossFire configuration.
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