ATI's New High End and Mid Range: Radeon X1950 XTX & X1900 XT 256MB
by Derek Wilson on August 23, 2006 9:52 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Power to the People
The major power hog of this generation is the X1900 XTX, as we have made clear in past articles. Almost disturbingly, a single X1900 XTX draws more power than a 7950 GX2, and X1900 XTX CrossFire is more power hungry than 7950 Quad SLI. While ATI already had the slightly lower clocked X1900 XT available for those who wanted something that acted slightly less as a space heater, they needed something that performed better and fit into the same (or better) power envelope to round out this generation of GPUs for them. What they latched on to has now given graphics cards sporting the R580+ a much needed drop in power: GDDR4.
As we explained in the GDDR4 section, the optimizations made to this generation of graphics memory technology have been designed with both power savings and potential speed in mind. We've already seen how the higher speed memory pulls through in our performance tests, but how does it hold up on the power front?
For this test, used our Kill-A-Watt to measure system power at the wall. Our load numbers are recorded as maximum power draw during a run of 3DMark06's fill rate and pixel shader feature tests.
Apparently, JEDEC and ATI did their jobs well when deciding on the features of GDDR4 and making the decision to adopt it so quickly. Not only has ATI been able to improve performance with their X1950 XTX, but they've been able to do so using significantly less power. While the X1950 XTX is still no where near the envelope of the 7900 GTX, drawing the same amount of power as the X1900 XT and 7950 GX2 is a great start.
It will certainly be interesting to see what graphics makers can do with this RAM when focusing on low power implementations like silent or budget products.
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JarredWalton - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
Anisotropic filtering was enabled in all tests at 8xAF as far as I know. When we use antialiasing, we generally enable anisotropic filtering as well.LoneWolf15 - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
Looks like there's no HDCP support or HDMI connector added like I'd expect with a brand new top-end card. And, they didn't add the new quieter cooler to the X1900XT. Pity. I doubt it would cost ATI more, and it'd up the sale of cards since people hate the noisy fan ATI has been currently using.I'll pass. My older (by alpha-geek standards) X800XL does the job fine.
P.S. -1 for not doing any bench tests with Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.
DerekWilson - Saturday, August 26, 2006 - link
also, all of these cards have HDCP support -- which I believe I mentioned somewhere in there. HDMI is up to the vendor.JarredWalton - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
+2 You might want to read page 8.LoneWolf15 - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
I don't know what's going on, I must have been blind. My apologies there, Jarred.Dfere - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
You just can't always eat your cake and then have it left over.YOu should change your phrase from "Sometimes we can have our cake and eat it too"
to "Sometimes we can eat our cake and have it too"
poohbear - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
the established exnglish expression is "you cant have your cake and eat it too", even if it doesnt make logical sense. There are many words and expressions that dont make sense in english (driveway, football, highway). Im guessing you're not a native english speaker, but that's the way the language is. now, please post about technology and not the logic of english expressions.Griswold - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
Whats wrong with football? Or do you mean american "football"?poohbear - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
can anyone confirm if those power consumption tests are for the entire system or just the vid cards? the highest figure was 267wts: a high end system that consumes 267wts underload is sweet! can you confirm that is indeed for the entire system (cpu, mobo, hdd, vid card... everything). thanks.JarredWalton - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
I'm pretty sure that this is power use for the entire system, but Derek's results are quite a bit lower than what I got on the ABS system I tested last week for X1900 CrossFire. Of course, the water cooling and extra fans on the ABS system might add a decent amount of power draw, and I don't know how "loaded" the systems are in this test. I would guess that Derek ran Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for load conditions.