Back when the X1900XT was released I remember thinking how soon it was after the launch of the X1800XT (3 months between both products) and only a month between the X1800XTPE and X1900XT. To anyone who had invested in an X1800XT that launch must have been a kick in the teeth as the X1900XT was a far superior product. Thankfully (for the consumer) ATI has left 7 months between the launch of the X1900XT and the announcement of their latest refresh.

Usually we would take a look at both the single card and dual card solutions at the same time for a new product if they are both available at launch however in the case of the X1950 XTX we are going to approach things a little differently and leave dual card performance for a later date. In our first article we will look at single card performance when gaming and playing back video as well a bit of over clocking. We will also take a step away from the norm and look at some interesting tests such as compatibility with X1900 series crossfire cards and gaming with the Core2 X6800 @ 4Ghz to see how the X1950 XTX compares to the latest and greatest from Nvidia when we remove any potential CPU bottleneck.

Rumors started circulating a couple of months ago that ATI were going to significantly change the cooling solution on their cards for the launch of the X1950. The reason for the change would seem to be a response to Nvidia's almost silent solution on the 7900GTX which makes the X1900XT series cards sound horrendously loud in comparison. Thankfully these rumors have proved to be true and as the image below shows, the cooler on the X1950 XTX is significantly different to that of the X1900 series. We will look at the cooler in more detail shortly, for now, lets look at the card itself a little more closely.

The X1950XTX has a code name of R580Plus, and as this suggests it uses the R580 core (0.09micron chip with 48 pixel Shader Processors – 8 vertex shaders, 16 rendering pixel pipelines, 16 ROP's and 16TMU's) however there are changes to the specification of the card. The first is the core speed. On the majority of X1900XT's the core speed is 625Mhz, the X1950XTX uses 650mhz at stock. The second, and most major change for this product is the use of GDDR4 memory.

The basic idea behind the switch to GDDR4 is that GDDR4's design allows memory chips to be added to the Radeon's 256bit memory bus (512bit for reads) which operate at a lower voltage than GDDR3, as well as running at higher speeds. This is reflected in the memory speed of the X1950XTX which sits at 1000mhz compared to the X1900XT's 725Mhz. For those reading who are interested in more technical information on GDDR4 and its advantages/differences here is an ATI produced PDF on the technology. Download or read it HERE (pdf).

Let us take a look at one of these GDDR4 chips without the cooler attached. As shown below the GDDR4 chips on the X1950XTX are manufactured by Samsung. When clocked at 1000Mhz these chips give the X1950 XT a theoretical bandwidth of 64Gb/s which compares favourably to the X1900XT (46.4Gb/s) and 7900GTX (51Gb/s). Looking closer at the memory we can see that these chips are branded K4U52324QE-BC09. Chips with that particular marking are rated up to 1.1Ghz so could well be promising when we come to over clocking later.

We can also see that the design of the card is very similar to the X1900XT. There really are no major new components and the only really noticeable change in design is the movement of the fan connector to the bottom right of the card.

While we have the cooler removed it gives us a chance to take a look at ATI's new design up close and personal. The cooler is a copper unit which has a large GPU block connected to a copper heat pipe. The fan is located at the right of the card and sucks air in from the front and back before blowing it across the copper heat sink and out of the case. As well as keeping the card cool this design also means that the case temperatures should be lowered as hot air from within the case is being vented.

There is also a second part to the cooling solution and that is the heat sink which sits on the memory chips. This is a passive heat sink and again is copper.

Is the cooler an improvement? Absolutely, the noise is much lower than a system with a X1900 or X1800 installed.

The back of the card is again very similar to the X1900XT and we could only see minor differences. There is an old saying “if it ain't broke, don’t fix it”, and that theory applies here.

The X1950XT has three outputs on our reference sample, two Dual Link DVI's and a VIVO out which is capable of outputting a HD signal to a compatible display. The card is also compatible with HDCP.

So that's the X1950XTX, in essence an evolutionary step on the R580 design which retains all of the features from the X1900XT such as HDR and AA support, ATI's Avivo technology and High Quality Anisotropic filtering and adds to it some potential improvements in performance via the use of GDDR4.