The latest and most powerful graphics card has been made by ATI. It’s the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX and it has a lot to be proud of. It boasts a 512Mb of 2Ghz GDDR4 memory, runs 48-pixel shaders and eight vertex shaders. What does all that mean? Well, it’s fast. Previous ATI high end cards suffered with a noisey fan but this has now been fixed. The price is a nice $449 which is not bad and very competitive with todays cards. A more indepth review can be found below.
Heat Problems are now Gone
The heat problems of the previous ATI Radion are now gone thanks to the new very quiet cooling system. The card sits in 2 slots on the back of your PC. One slot is used for the vents to throw out excessive hot air and the other is for the connectors which will be discussed later. The cooling system usually stays quite although every now and again the fans crank up a notch to blast out hot air when it gets too hot in there. This comes out of the exhaust system and is first extracted from the GPU by the copper pipe.
GDDR4 Memory
The ATI Radion X1950 XTX uses the new GDDR4 memory. It has 512Mb of the stuff on board and can boast that it is the first graphics card to use this type of memory. GDDR4 for those of you who do not know is Graphics Double Data Rate, version 4 and built by Samsung. It hasnt been used commercially yet and the Radion card is the first to use this type of memory. No shortages are expected for the launch date on the 14th September 2006. More details of GDDR4 can be found at Wikipedia.
Power
This is the good stuff now. What can it do? A lot. Reghardware got their hands on one of these cards and put it through it’s paces on various 3D mark benchmarks and it did very well. Full graphs and details can be found at Reghardware.
Via: TechEBlog
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