PowerColor X1900 GT

Introduction

The introduction of RADEON X1900 series brought bannana type smiles to our faces. ATI customers were happy to get more raw power for their SM 2.0 / SM 3.0 games. Beginning of 2006 ATI however offered only high-end boards and no cut down versions were available. Until Q2 2006 if you were in the market for new Canadian processor you were either stuck with X1900 XT or XTX -- great cards, but expensive and bulky. Around May, ATI decided to kick NVIDIA's green buttocks and take on GeForce 7900 GT. With that in mind, RADEON X1900 GT has been introduced.

Engine behind the GT is of course R580. Obviously it's not a fully operational R580, but it sports 36 Pixel Shaders, compared to 48 for XT / XTX. As for texture units / ROPs, ATI decided to reduce them by 4 and ending up with 12 of each. There is "only" 256 MBs of onboard memory so keep that in mind. All other features were left alone -- vertex shaders (8), dispatch processor, memory controller were left unchanged.

If you want to see the rest of the good info, read on. Ah, almost forgot to introduce the product I'm testing today. As you might have guessed though, it's X1900 GT from our beloved PowerColor.


Should you require more detailed information on X1K GPUs please revisit our article: The X1000 series - ATI goes SM3.0


PowerColor is a consumer brand focused on providing cutting-edge graphics card products to retail customers. Our goal for the Tul brand is to be the industry's number one provider of technology product solutions. Our goal for the PowerColor brand is to be the world's number one brand of graphics cards. PowerColor is in effect owned by Tul Corporation, however the brands are operated independently of each other.