ATI's Radeon X1900 Heats Up With 48 Shader Units

Sizing Things Up

We received the X1900 Crossfire and the X1900XTX from ATI. In terms of physical dimensions, we observed that the cards are long, and might block SATA ports on the motherboard, depending on the layout of your board. This is no different than that of NVIDIA cards of late, and the X1900 cards are the same length as the X1800 cards as well. That is the price you pay for speed, of course ; you have to sacrifice space, noise, power, and money.

The cooler is the same two slot solution as the X1800 as well. However, the cooler on the retail Crossfire card will have a black plastic shroud instead of the white of the slave cards. The fan on the cooler is extremely annoying when you are setting up the system for the first time... Crossfire doubles that pleasure with stereo decibels. Once the cards are installed and ready to run, there are no sound issues. When the system boots there is the initial speed up that is loud but it goes away as the operating system loads the driver.

The cooler block is like that of the Radeon X1800 in that it is heavy due to the amount of copper. There is an alloy that cools the memory as well as the compositing chip on Crossfire cards. A copper die sticks up through the alloy and touches the core. This layout seems to work well, as the card could operate even when we pulled the fan power connection off the card. In 2D mode the card operated normally, but of course was hotter than normal. When we attempted a 3D application the system froze, and we were forced to reboot the system. Upon reconnecting the power to the fan and rebooting the system, all was normal so this gives hope to those concerned about proper cooling if a fan failure occurs. (Note that we do not recommend running the cards without the supplied cooling solution, but we felt we should test this out.)

We took the cards we received and placed them into the reference RD480 based motherboard we used in prior Crossfire testing. Although ATI released Catalyst 6.1 last week, it did not work with the cards we received. We had to test the Radeon X1900 cards using a special driver designed for these cards. Since Catalyst 6.1 is what the rest of the world has for their hardware, we chose to use this latest driver for the Radeon X1800 cards that were on the market.

Test Setup