Old Hand Meets Young Firebrand: ATi FireGL X1 and Nvidia Quadro4 980XGL

Page 3 of 20:

The Boards Close-Up

ATi FireGL X1

Judged solely by appearance, the FireGL X1 hardly differs from its mainstream peers. Only the graphics chip was modified slightly by a microcode update. Thus, its hardware functions are almost identical to those of the Radeon 9700 Pro. The major difference lies in the driver programming. The synchronization with high-end applications in the workstation segment, support and certification result in far higher costs than the consumer-product equivalent, and these costs are passed on to the customer accordingly.

The street price of a FireGL X1 in its 128 MB variation is $749/ €799 in many places; the 256 MB model (equipped with an extra jack for stereographics glasses) has a price tag of $949/ €999. The Radeon/ FireGL 9700 Pro chip runs at a speed of 325 MHz. The manufacturer powers the Ramdacs with 400 MHz. The accuracy per color channel is 10 bits. The card slot is designed to support up to AGP8X (AGP specification 3.0). Only the very latest chipsets, such as the Intel E7205 (Granite Bay) and the Nvidia nForce2, support AGP8X.