The Card

The Diamond Viper X1900XT sports a nice picture of ATI's Ruby on the stock heatsink/fan. The stock heatsink/fan is fairly large to meet the cooling needs of this powerful card. Along with a large heatsink/fan comes considerable amount of noise.


On the backside of the card you can notice there are no memory chips - older generations of video cards from ATI such as the X800 series, had the memory on both sides of the cards.


The X1900 comes with dual DVI ports and also a port to plug in an extension cable for TV in/out and HDTV. The card's dual slot configuration is to accommodate the large cooler, and also has a exhaust vent. On the backside of the card, you can see the heatsink/fan's air intake. Air is also pulled over another smaller heatsink in front of the cooler. This heatsink is for the voltage regulators.


And the heart of it all - the R580. When the heatsink is taken off, the memory chips and core are exposed. There is 512MB of Samsung GDDR3 1.1ns memory (K4J52324QC-BJ11), rated for 900MHZ (DDR1800MHz) @ 2.0V ± 0.1V. The thermal paste looks a little rough but I checked both cards and they were identical in the type as well as the look.