ATI’s Radeon X1950XT was launched last month to quite a bit of positive response due to it being the first consumer card to use GDDR4 and overall performance – in fact, it is the fastest single GPU card available. Two of the first add-in board makers to harness this technology are Sapphire and Visiontek; both of which should be familiar brands to ATI-loyalists and PC enthusiasts.

What’s not new about the 1950 is the actual GPU – it’s nothing more than a tricked-out R580 core with an updated cooler and paired to faster graphics memory. It’s still clocked at 650 Megahertz, but the beefed up cooler is quieter and allows for a slight degree of better overclocking. It utilizes a quiet cooling fan that intakes air from within the PC and blows it over a heatpipe – picking up the hot air and venting it out thru the back of the card, out of the PC. We love this design and feel it should be a sign of things to come from reference designs of future cards from both NVIDIA and ATI.

The primary advantage of GDDR4 memory chips is that ATI has been able to clock them up to a staggering 1000 Megahertz (2000MHz DDR); a whopping 250MHz faster than the Radeon X1900XT’s used. Additionally, ATI claims that the newer modules consume less power than GDDR3 did.

The R580+ GPU that resides on these cards is produced on 90 nanometer technology which lets ATI keep a fast clock rate on the PGU and still have it run relatively cool. In a few ways, it has a superior architecture to NVIDIA as it features 48 pixel pipelines, 8 vertex shaders, a 256bit GDDR4 interface and a 512-bit ring bus memory controller.

Full shader-model 3.0 support means that all of today’s top-tier games will look their best and means that you’ll be able to run great-looking games well into the DirectX 10 era.

Sapphire’s card is a dead knock-off of the reference design with the only exception being its own logo in the middle of the cooler. They offer a 2yr warranty, a selection of Video in/out cables and a “select your own game” disc that gives gamers a variety of games to choose from to buy.

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Article Index
Sapphire & Visiontek Radeon X1950XTX Cards
Sapphire Cont.
Visiontek Radeon X1950XTX
Visiontek Cont. / Test setup
3dmark, FEAR and COD2
Quake 4 / Conclusion