ATI Crossfire Video Card Review :: X1900XT Crossfire Edition Master Card + ASUS X1900XTX Card

X1900 Crossfire Edition
Brand	ATI
Model	X1900 Crossfire Edition
Graphics Chip	R580
Graphics Memory Type	DDR3
Memory (MB)	512
Graphics Core Clock (MHz)	621
Memory Clock (MHz)	1494
Memory Speed (ns)	1.3
RAMDAC Frequency (MHz)	Dual 400
Active Cooling on Graphics Chip	Yes
Heatsink on Memory	Yes
Video Capture	Yes
Ports
Dual Monitor Support	Yes
VGA Out	DVI-I, Crossfire Connector
Video In and Out	S-Video Out
Package and Support
Printed Manual	N/A
Driver CD	N/A
Performance Tool Software	Overdrive
Major Games	N/A
Major Software	Tounmichi 3D Edit
VR Glasses	No
DVD Player Software	ASUS DVD
Video Recording Software	N/A

X1900 Crossfire Edition

• 90 nanometer technology
• 384 Million Transistors
• 16 ROPs
• 48 Pixel Shader Processors
• 8 Vertex Shader Processors
• DirectX 9.0c
• Pixel Shader 3.0
• Vertex Shader 3.0
• Render to Vertex Buffer
• HDR
• Sparse sample Multisample AntiAliasing
• Up to 6 sample MSAA
• up to 16X Anisotropic Filtering
• High Quality AF
• 512bit Ring Bus Memory controller
• 512MB DDR3 memory
• 621MHz Core Clock
• 747 MHz Memory Clock

The X1900 Crossfire Edition card is similar in many respects to the X1900XT card in terms of PCB and layout. The card has a 2-slot cooling solution, meaning you need an adjacent PCI slot free to install the card in a case. All of the tophigh-end cards from both NVIDIA and ATI require 2-slots, as single slot cooling isn't sufficient for the high clock speeds the cards run at or the high temperatures they run also. The X1800 Crossfire Edition card is nearly identical in look to the X1900 Crossfire Edition card.

ATI chose to cool both the X1900 Crossfire Edition card and the X1800 Crossfire Edition card with a 29-fin Radial fin covering the front portion of the PCB. Air is sucked in from the front of the card, and blown out through the fins of the heatsink on the rear of the card. In operation both cards were extremely hot, reaching 90C in some situations. The heatsink covers the vast majority of the rest of the front of the card including the memory chips.

All three cards are PCI Express native cards. Early NVIDIA PCI Express cards required a HSI bridge chip to operate on the PCI Express bus. All ATI cards from the beginning were PCI Express native, meaning they could work without a bridge chip. ATI's strategy backfired a little when the demand last year for PCI Express cards didn't meet expectations and they had to write off inventory. The card also requires extra power, necessitating the use of a PCI Express power connector.

Input and Output ports on the Crossfire Edition cards are different than the regular cards. ATI includes a connector for the Crossfire cable, a DVI-I port and a S-Video Out port. The Crossfire cable connects to the other card in PCI Express X16 slot #2 then to the monitor with the other cord. It's a simple solution but I prefer NVIDIA's SLI bridge due to the ease with which the cable can be dislodged.

The X1900 Crossfire Edition is based upon ATI's R580 chipset. This is a heavily modified R5xx architecture. ATI decided to triple the Pixel Shader Processors on the R580 from the 16 found on the R520. This means there are 48 Pixel Shader Processors on the X1900XTX card. The Outputted Pixels on the card are the same from the previous generation. ATI and NVIDIA feel that future games will require more Shader power, and the way ATI is providing it is by tripling the number of ALUs. The number of Vertex Shaders is the same as that found on the X1800XT, 8.

The clock speed of the X1900XTX is overclocked a little from ATI's reference 625MHz speed. The card is clocked at 648MHz. With 16 Pixel Pipelines this gives a fillrate of over 10 Gigapixels a second and a vertex rate of over 1.3 Billion Vertices a second. The pace at which video card technology has progressed is amazing. It wasn't that long ago that the highest fillrate on a video card was under 1 Gigapixel (Geforce 2 GTS from 2001). The memory speed of the video card is 775MHz or 1.55GHz. The memory bandwidth on the card is over 49GB a second. I was able to overclock the card to 689MHz for the core and 800MHz for the memory with ATI's Overdrive utility