A Closer Look

If you give me such a nice card, the first I will do with it is take it apart.

Basically there are three independent parts to the cooling system of this card.

• red transparent fan casing and fan
• memory heatsink
• voltage regulator heatsink

Each is attached with own screws on the backside. So if you only want to remove the fan assembly you unscrew the four screws in the middle.


If you take a close look you can see that two of the screws are part of the metal clip and are backed with little springs. This is to ensure that the mounting pressure is applied evenly when the backplate is installed.


With just the fan removed, the memory heatsink is still in place. I like this a lot since you can now put a waterblock here without having to worry about watercooling the memory as well.


Under the memory heatsink you have the GDDR4 memory chips in the usual placement. The thermal pads come off easily and can be reused.


The long metal heatsink in the first picture cools the power regulation circuitry. Unlike the X1900 the mounting now uses metal screws and the heatsink is made from copper.


I was hoping to find a little more information about who makes the fan under the sticker, but it seems it's a customized version just for ATI.


To my surprise the GPU is still marked as "R580" - no "R580+".


The memory chips are brand-new 0.9 ns Samsung GDDR4 K4U52324QE - B609, Samsung's official product page is here. Samsung has been demoing GDDR4 running at 0.6ns which equates 1.6 GHz/3.2 GHz DDR - 1 GHz is just the start of the technology.
The 0.9 ns spec of the chips allows 1.1 GHz clock speed. With the X1950 XTX clocked at 1 GHz there is definitely some overclocking headroom.


ATI's good old Rage Theater chip is on the card too of course for all your video needs.


Another small change is that instead of the Volterra VT1103 voltage regulator, ATI now uses the Volterra VT1105. Unfortunately it is not 100% register compatible to the VT1103, so the monitoring of Current Draw and Voltage Regulator temperature is not possible yet with ATITool.