Page 1

ATI Radeon X1950 XTX
Price 399 EUR
Info: ATI.com

Hello and welcome to another AMD article :) Oh yes .. didn't you know ? ATI was bought by AMD recently. Quite exciting times for sure and rest assured we'll see some changes in the ATI product line-up in the years to come. Today however we'll be looking at a new high-end product from Battlestar GallATIca as they are introducing three new products today.

These are what, in the industry, we call refresh products. Based on current technology an advancement will be made to make the product more competitive. Let me quickly browse you through the three new products after which we'll dive into a review on the Radeon X1950 XTX.

Introducing the three new products - if you are a Guru3D regular then you have learned by now that there are three segments the graphics industry moves in for the consumers, low, mid and high-range products. For each of these segments ATI is releasing a new product to fill the gap with NVIDIA. This means that within each product segment a new, faster product is included.

The new kids:

• Radeon X1300 XT
• Radeon X1650 Pro
• Radeon X1900 XT 256MB
• Radeon X1950 XTX

Obviously the X1300 XT is the missing product in the low-end segment. Dirt cheap products that rock standard daily usage of your PC, watching movies, HTPC ... but it's not for gaming. We'll review one of these quite soon.

The second product was really badly needed. When ATI released the X1600 series of cards they simply had no good answer against NVIDIA's GeForce 7600 GT and quickly had to "patch" that gap with Products like the X1800 XL and GTO. Again a product we'll review soon. The Radeon X1650 Pro and X1300XT are very similar in specifications with 12 pixel shaders and 5 vertex shaders. The Radeon X1650 Pro will have a 600 MHz core and 1.4 GHz memory clock while the X1300XT will have a 500 MHz core and 800 MHz memory clock.

What we will be focusing on today will be the all new Radeon X1950 XTX. A product that is somewhat lined up against the dual-gpu solution called GeForce 7950 GX2, a product which offers great performance for a really okay price. So ATI figured .. hmm we can do better than that and even at a better price so they introduced the Radeon X1950 XTX, Specifications for the Radeon X1950XTX and X1950 CrossFire are finalized with a 650 MHz core clock and an impressive 2 GHz effective memory clock.

So read this well ... the new Radeon X1950 series cards will have 650 MHz core clocks as the previous X1900XTX graphics cards. Memory has been upgraded to GDDR4 clocked at 2 GHz instead of the previous 1.45 GHz on the Radeon X1900XTX

Now that by itself will not be enough to overpower the GX2. The trick is that ATI claims that two 399 EUR costing X1950 XTX cards will perform better than Quad SLI. An interesting statement yet we have only one X1950 XTX card so we can't really check that. But what about single X1950 XTX performance ? The core clock is unchanged from the previous Radeon X1900XTX while memory clock receives a hefty 450 MHz boost. How did ATI manage that ?

Next page please.