ATI Radeon X1950 XTX and high end multi-GPU solutions
by Damien Triolet
Published on August 23, 2006
As was the case with the Radeon X800, ATI decided it was time for a face lift for the current top of the line, the Radeon X1900 XTX. The Radeon X1950 XTX is born. What improvements does it bring? What is the position of this new top of line product compared to what NVIDIA offers?
One takes again the same ones and one starts the same
The Radeon X1950 XTX’s code name is R580+, which leads us to believe that it could be a "die shrink" using TSMC´s 80nm fabrication process instead of the 90 nm. Such a “die shrink” would have reduced chip size, production costs and power consumption. The cost of this new development however probably wouldn´t have been justified by a small product modification. The R580+ isn´t different than the R580 even if its release goes along with a minor chip revision which changed to A31 (instead of previous A22). ATI most likely has seized the opportunity of this revision to improve yield and also correct some of the latest bugs due to GDDR4 memory support and to optimise the memory controller.
The board
The main difference compared to the Radeon X1900 XTX is of course the cooling system, which has finally evolved. ATI has abandoned the previous system, which was heavily criticized because of the noise level once the load increases. Testing two cards in Crossfire was a real nightmare. The new one is a lot more silent, but NVIDIA´s solution with the GeForce 7900 GTX remains a bit more so under comparable conditions.
The GPU is clocked at 650 MHz just like the Radeon X1900 XTX. Calculation power is unchanged. The GDDR4 makes it possible for ATI to increase the memory bandwidth by 30% from 775 MHz to 1 GHZ.
