ATI Radeon X1900 Series

The Battle for for graphics card supremacy has been hotting up and also its been speeding up. The releases of faster and more advanced graphics cards have been coming a lot quicker recently. The Geforce 7800 stole the crown not so long ago, then the release of the X1800 for the time being took the fastest graphics card title. Nvidia promptly released the Geforce 7800 512 GTX and now the release of ATI's X1900 series has shook everything up once again.

The X1900 comes in 4 flavours. Not massively different from each other except for some differences in speed and features of the card. Essentially the core logic is the same. The four varieties are the X1900 XT which is the slowest (but by no means slow), The X1900 XTX which is the flagship product of the series, with the fastest memory and core clock speeds. Then we have the X1900 Crossfire master edition, this card is used as the primary card in a Crossfire multi GPU system. The final card is the X1900 All-in-Wonder with TV and video capabilities.

The X1900 is always going to be about more speed and better frame rates, but the press hype is not all about that, we've heard all this before. ATI are looking to deliver something different to produce the power required to take the crown. Well how about using 48 pixel shaders. Yes that's right 48 pixel shaders. That's double the 24 that the very recent X1800XT has to offer. Without going into too much detail about pixel shaders, the main aim of these is to allow games creators to do fancy tricks with their graphics. This makes games look more realistic, and produce incredible effects.

X1900 Series Compared

These are just a few of the specs we can look at. For a closer look at these cards take a look at Graphics Card Comparison 3. The first thing you may notice is the Crossfire edition is essentially the same as the X1900 XT. The Crossfire card is the X1900 XT with the added components to make it enabled to be a Crossfire master card. The All in Wonder X1900 has been lowered clock and memory speed wise but the All-in-Wonder is about video editing as well as TV and DVD playback while still being able to play the latest games and reasonable resolutions and graphics detail.

Features of the X1900 (R580)

• 384 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process
• 48 pixel shader processors
• 8 vertex shader processors
• 256-bit 8-channel GDDR3
• memory interface
• Native PCI Express x16 bus interface

X1000 Series Card comparison

The X1000 series has become very comprehensive, and the X1900 range may have just completed that series, we will have to wait and see. But lets have a look at the specs of the top cards in each range. From the X1300 pro up to the X1900 XTX.

Looking at the ATI Radeon X1900

Taking a closer look at the X1900 we can tell you that the card is fairly long. This wont be a problem in most machines, but it might but worth checking you have no important connectors at the end of your PCI-Express slot. Some motherboards do have a tendency to put a S-ATA or similar in that very position. The cooler is very similar to that on the X1800 series graphics cards. It takes an extra slot because of the size of the heatsink and fan, this is fairly standard these days however on top of the range cards. The card to the left is a Crossfire master card. These can be distinguished by the black plastic covering. The Non-Crossfire master cards will all have white plastic covering. The noise from the X1900's fan is quite loud to start with but once everything is setup it does quieten down noticeably. Every start-up there is a burst of noise, but again this settles down each time. Using crossfire of course doubles the decibel output from the X1900's but this is the price you pay for power and speed. Rather have the extra noise than burn out the GPU.

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Useful Links For the Radeon X1900