ATI Radeon X1950 Pro: CrossFire Done Right
by Derek Wilson on October 17, 2006 6:22 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Power
The current generation of ATI GPUs have been very power hungry. With much higher transistor counts and larger die sizes than competing NVIDIA products, ATI has lagged behind NVIDIA for quite some time in the area of performance per watt. The trade off has been that ATI's parts are more feature complete than NVIDIA's. The price for full time 32bit processing in pixel shaders, angle independent anisotropic filtering, antialiasing of floating point textures, and fine grained branching must be paid somehow. A more power hungry, hotter running chip is certainly a fine trade off to get the performance ATI is capable of delivering.
But with the RV570 that powers the X1950 Pro, we expect to see a little better power consumption. Additional transistors are used for the integrated CrossFire compositing engine, but with fewer pixel shaders and a smaller fab process the X1950 Pro comes in much smaller. R580 weighs in at 384 Million transistors with a 352mm2 die size, while the RV570 GPU is 330 Million transistors and 230mm2. What does all of this translate to in terms of power? Let's take a look.
While the X1950 Pro does show a drop in power from the X1900 GT, the decrease isn't huge. Part of this is due to the fact that the X1950 Pro uses faster memory than the X1900 GT (1380MHz as opposed to 1200MHz). Taking the fact that the X1950 Pro is also higher performance than the X1900 GT, we can certainly be happy with what ATI has delivered. Compared to the 7900 GS, the X1950 Pro is higher performance, but also higher power. We'll have to wait until we see an 80nm high end part to see if there will be a decrease in power where it is needed most.
The fan used isn't really louder than the X1900 GT, but the aural quality isn't as desirable in our opinion. The new fan on the X1950 Pro is a little higher pitched and whiny. We would also love to see the 4-pin fan control employed on the rest of the X1950 series here as well, but the control is more important on a larger fan anyway.
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Zoomer - Thursday, October 19, 2006 - link
Is this a optical shrink to 80nm?Answering this question will put overclocking expectations in line. Generally, optically shrunk cores from TSMC overclock to the about the same as the original or perhaps slightly worse.
coldpower27 - Friday, October 20, 2006 - link
Well no as this piepline configuration doesn't exist natively before on the 90nm node. It's a 3 Quad Part, so it's basedon R580 but has 1 Quad Physical removed as well as being shrunk to 80nm. Not to mention Native Crossfire support was added onto the die.Spoelie - Friday, October 20, 2006 - link
Optical shrink, this is 80nm and the original was 90nm. You're normally correct because the first optical shrink usually does not have the same technologies as the proces higher up (low-k and SOI for example, this was the case with 130nm -> 110nm), but I don't think it's the case for this generation. Regardless, haven't seen any overclocking articles on it yet so I'm quite curious.Spoelie - Friday, October 20, 2006 - link
oie, maybe I should add that it's reworked as well, so both actually. Since this core didn't exist before (rv570 and that pipeline configuration), I don't think that they just sliced a part of the core...Zstream - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Beyond3D reported the spec change a month before anyone received the card. I think you need to do some FAQ checking on your opinions mate.All in all decent review but poor unknowledgeable opinions…
DerekWilson - Wednesday, October 18, 2006 - link
Just because ATI made the spec change public does not mean it is alright to change the specs of a product that has been shipping for 4 months.X1900 GT has been available since May 9 as a 575/1200 part.
The message we want to send isn't that ATI is trying to hide something, its that they shouldn't do the thing in the first place.
No matter how many times a company says it changed the specs of a product, when people search for reviews they're going to see plenty that have been written since May talking about the original X1900 GT.
Naming is already ambiguous enough. I stand by my opinion that having multiple versions of a product with the exact same name is a bad thing.
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear on this in the article. Please let me know if there's anything I can reword to help get my point across.
Zoomer - Thursday, October 19, 2006 - link
This is very common. Many vendors in the past have passed off 8500s that run at 250/250 instead of the stock 275/275, and don't label them as such.There are some Asus SKUs that have this same handicap, but I can't recall what models that were.
xsilver - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
any word on what the new price for the x1900gt's will be now that the x1950pros are out?or are they being phased out and no price drop is being considered?
Wellsoul2 - Monday, November 6, 2006 - link
You guys are such cheerleaders..For a single card buy why would you get this?
Why would you buy the 1900GT even after the
1900XT 256MB came out?
I got my 1900XT 256MB for $240 shipped..
Except for power consumption it's a much better card.
You get to run Oblivion great with one card.
Two cards is such a scam. More expensive motherboard..power consumption etc.
This is progress? CPU's have evolved..
It's hard to even find a motherboard with 3 PCI slots..
What a scam! Where's my ultra-fast HDTV board for PCI Express?
Seriously..Why buy into SLI/Crossfire? Why not 2 GPU's on one card?
Too late..You all bought into it.
Sorry I am just so sick of the praise for this money-grab of SLI/Crossfire.
jcromano - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Are the power consumption numbers (98W idle, 181W load) for just the graphics card or are they total system power?Thanks in advance,
Jim