What Lies Beneath? Uncovered...

Enough about the looks, time to dig a bit deeper. Let's see what lies beneath the cooling system of the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO graphics accelerator. We are taking a look under the hood by pulling of the Accelero X2 cooling. 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. However we don't recommend it...

After removing the screws, the heatsink can be taken of and the full scale PCB sees the light. What a difference, the main weight of the Radeon X1950 PRO comes from the Accelero X2 cooling 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 removed.

The PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO is powered by the RV570 series line of graphics processors, set at 595MHz clock speed. The RV570 chip is based upon the R580 core, but stripped down in terms of raw performance. The RV570 chip uses an 80nm 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 just a bit smaller, and protected against damage with a traditional metal frame.

	Radeon X1950 XTX	Radeon X1950 PRO
Core Speed	650MHz	595MHz
Memory Speed	2.00GHz	1.40GHz
Memory Size	512MB GDDR4	512MB GDDR3
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit
Pixel Shaders	48	36
Vertex Shaders	8	8
HDCP Support	Yes	Compliant

The Radeon X1950 PRO shares the same full 512-bit internal, 256-bit external ring bus memory controller just as the Radeon X1900 series. This advanced ring bus technology that ATI developed within the RV570 core comes with a great memory bandwidth that can be used to process a substantial amount of data. HDCP support for Radeon X1950 PRO graphics cards is optional and not required by ATI, though the reference board is HDCP compliant.

The PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO 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 RV570 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.

With 512MB GDDR3 memory the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO is well equipped for experiencing the full graphical power of current gaming technology. It features Infineon branded GDDR3 memory which is running at 1.4GHz, following the reference design by ATI. These Infineon GDDR3 chips come marked as 1.4ns access time and are therefore rated at 1.4GHz frequency and operating at 2.0V. So what does that mean...no overclocking? Well, not at all as these Infineon chips can easily reach over 1.5GHz!

Just to the left of the RV570 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 PRO with various video capabilities enhanced by the Avivo technology. Well that's about it on the insights of the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO 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, and start our engines!