ATI Radeon X1900 Series Preview

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian
ATI
Jan. 24, 2006

Specifications

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Introduction

While we were in Vegas for CES we had the opportunity to meet privately with some of our friends at ATI. Unfortunately, our meeting was to be under NDA until Tuesday, January 24th at 8am CST. That would be why you didn't see any mention of ATI in our CES coverage this year, all of the good stuff was under embargo.

Now that the embargo has lifted, I can finally tell you all about what's new from ATI. The 4 cards that are being launched today are part of ATI's new X1900 series. From top to bottom, there is the Radeon X1900 XTX, Radeon X1900 Crossfire, Radeon X1900 XT, and All-In-Wonder X1900. It would be nice if ATI and NVIDIA would pick a naming convention and stick with it, but I guess that's just marketing for you - they want to keep it fresh. ATI is promising quantity shipping at launch, with emphasis on the X1900 XTX and X1900 XT. The Crossfire and All-In-Wonder cards will also be available, but perhaps less so since there isn't expected to be as much demand for those products. That said, even if some retailers don't have all of the new X1900 cards, they will be available on ATI.com. Here are the specs of the new cards:

Radeon X1900 XTX 48 pixel pipelines 650MHz engine clock 1.55GHZ (DDR) memory 512MB GDDR3 $649 Shipping 1/24/06	Radeon X1900 Crossfire 48 pixel pipelines 625 MHz engine clock 1.45GHz (DDR) memory 512MB GDDR3 $599 Shipping 1/24/06	All-In-Wonder X1900 48 pixel pipelines 500MHz engine clock 960MHz (DDR) memory 256MB GDDR3 $499 Shipping 1/24/06
	Radeon X1900 XT 48 pixel pipelines 625MHz engine clock 1.45GHz (DDR) memory 512MB GDDR3 $549 Shipping 1/24/06

As you can see from the specifications, the X1900 Crossfire is the same as a X1900 XT with the only difference being that it is a Crossfire master card. The X1900 XTX is only marginally faster than the X1900 XT, so I would venture a guess that you could easily overclock an XT to XTX speeds and save yourself $100. Of course, if you're not comfortable with overclocking and you want to have the biggest, baddest card and you've got the money to blow, what's another $100, right?

Once we returned from Vegas, I received the X1900 XTX and X1900 Crossfire. Today we will be taking a first look at the X1900 XTX, while saving Crossfire testing for the full review. In this preview we will test 5 cards in 5 games. The cards we will be testing include the ATI X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-E, ATI X1800 XT 512MB PCI-E, ATI X850 XT PE 256MB PCI-E, XFX 7800 GTX 256MB PCI-E, and the XFX 6800GT 256MB PCI-E. The games we'll be benchmarking with consist of Half-Life 2, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, F.E.A.R. - First Encounter Assault Recon, Quake 4 and Need for Speed Most Wanted.

Our goal is not to come to a conclusive statement recommending or not recommending ATI's new cards, but rather to give some insight as to what we can expect from our full review. In addition to the benchmarking you will see here today, we will test more games at more settings, evaluate image quality in several leading games, test Crossfire versus SLI, and see what the overclocking potential is in our full review. So make sure to keep an eye out for that in the weeks to come.

One last thing I'd like to mention before getting to the body of the preview is that in my last video card review I mentioned that our test system used an Athlon64 3500+, a mid-range processor that would prove to be a bottleneck when running dual high-end GPUs in SLI or Crossfire. I'm happy to report that we've finally acquired an Athlon64 FX-55, and although it isn't the highest-end processor anymore, it goes a long way to reduce bottlenecks. A big thanks goes out to our good friend, Paul Capello (a.k.a. Crimson Sky), professional case modder and owner of TheBestCaseScenario.com, for helping us to get the FX-55.

We'd like to thank Directron.com for donating the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Socket 939 Motherboard which we used for testing.

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Introducing the X1900 Series (R580) / Architecture & New Features
Page 3: The Card (X1900 XTX)
Page 4: Test Setup
Page 5: Benchmarks - Half-Life 2
Page 6: Benchmarks - Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Page 7: Benchmarks - F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon
Page 8: Benchmarks - Quake 4
Page 9: Benchmarks - Need for Speed Most Wanted
Page 10: Closing Thoughts

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3 User Comments

1 - Posted by J2T on May 31, 2007 - 5:53 am

??? time warp?

2 - Posted by Kurtis on May 31, 2007 - 12:17 pm

i'm sure there was a spam post, then the spam was deleted, leaving a bumped thread. =]

3 - Posted by J2T on June 1, 2007 - 6:07 pm

haha, excuses excuses :)

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