ATI Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-Express

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian
ATI
Jun. 12, 2006

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Introduction

Back in January, I wrote a preview of ATI's top-of-the-line X1900 XTX. At the time, our main focus was to see how much of a performance increase there was from the X1800 XT it replaced. It wasn't until just recently that we were able to fully assess the X1900 XTX as a high-end video card in comparison with the competition, because we did not have a 7900 GTX. Last month we finally broke down and purchased a BFG 7900 GTX OC, because it had become evident that we simply would not get our hands on a sponsored review sample, and we were determined to test the card against the competition.

So, what makes the X1900 XTX different from the X1800 XT? The biggest difference with the X1900 is that it has more pipelines as well as slight increase in core and memory clock speeds. How many pipelines were added, you might ask? A few. More precisely, three times as many. The X1800 XT had a core clock speed of 625MHz, 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.50GHz, and a total of 16 pixel pipelines. The X1900 XTX has a core clock of 650MHz, 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.55GHz, and 48 pixel pipelines. While it's a little faster in terms of clock speeds, the main difference is the pixel pipeline count. Of course, the X1900 XTX isn't the only X1900 card, so here's an overview of the X1900 series:

	Core Speed	Memory Speed	Pixel Shader Processors	Vertex Shader
X1900 XTX	650 MHz	1.55 GHz	48	8
X1900 XT	625 MHz	1.45 GHz	48	8
X1900 CrossFire Edition	625 MHz	1.45 GHz	48	8
X1900 GT	575 MHz	1.2 GHz	36	8

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. Something you should keep in mind is that there is no X1900 XTX master card, so if you plan to use Crossfire now or in the future, you should definitely save $100 since that X1900 XTX would underclock to X1900 XT speeds in Crossfire mode. If you're interested in all the gritty details regarding the X1900 series architecture and features, have a look at our X1900 Series Preview.

For our full review, we have re-tested ATI's Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB PCI-Express video card along with 11 other cards (including the 7900 GTX) in 7 popular games (plus 3DMark, which doesn't really count). Without further ado, here is my comprehensive review of X1900 XTX.

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: The Card
Page 3: Test Setup
Page 4: Benchmarks: Half-Life 2
Page 5: Benchmarks: Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
Page 6: Benchmarks: Quake 4
Page 7: Benchmarks: X3 Reunion Demo
Page 8: Benchmarks: Chronicles of Riddick
Page 9: Benchmarks: F.E.A.R.
Page 10: Benchmarks: Need for Speed Most Wanted
Page 11: Benchmarks: 3DMark '06
Page 12: Performance Summary
Page 13: Conclusion

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