Board analysis

Single-slot cooling

Back of the card

The first thing that really stands out when you first look at the Radeon X1950 Pro reference board is its size – its PCB is considerably longer than NVIDIA’s GeForce 7900 GT or 7900 GS. Measuring in at 9.5” in length, it’s about 2.5” longer than the X1600 XT and 1.5” longer than the aforementioned GeForce 7900 cards, but roughly similar in length to the Radeon X1900 GT board it replaces.

At first glance the Radeon X1950 Pro’s new cooler may remind you of the cooling unit used on the Radeon X1950 XTX, but it’s actually a completely different design.

For starters, while both cooling units are ducted coolers and are based around copper heatsinks, the Radeon X1950 XTX sports heatpipe cooling for increased effectiveness, the X1950 Pro relies solely on a copper heatsink/fan unit for cooling.

The Radeon X1950 XTX is also a dual-slot cooler that exhausts hot air from the GPU outside your system case, in contrast the cooler used on the Radeon X1950 Pro is a single-slot cooler, and it doesn’t exhaust hot air outside the case. Instead hot air exits out the top of the cooler, just between the CrossFire connector and the cooler’s fan.

The fan itself is located offset of the graphics core. This serves two purposes. By pushing the fan further away from the front of the graphics card, the card’s fan is less audible to your ears as the fan is located deeper inside the system case. Previous ducted cooling designs from ATI located the fan on the opposite end of the cooling unit, closer to the back plate of the graphics card and thus closer to the end of the case where fan noise can ultimately escape the enclosure.

Closer shot of the fan here

Air exits here

The other benefit to this design is that the fan’s duct is longer, increasing the effectiveness of the cooling system.

Sitting directly atop the RV570 GPU is a very long copper plate. The copper plate runs the entire length of the duct and is approximately 7.5” long. This plate is responsible for drawing heat off the GPU; this heat is then dispersed across the plate’s long surface area. From here ATI has attached copper fins to the base plate, further increasing the surface area of the cooler. Fresh air from the card’s fan helps to keep everything cool, and as we mentioned previously the air is then exhausted out the top of the ducted cooling unit.

In operation it’s a system that works quite well, the Radeon X1950 Pro operates much cooler than previous mainstream offerings such as the X1900 GT (our reference X1950 Pro card ran 12 degrees cooler than the X1900 GT at idle!), and the card’s fan is much quieter as well: ATI’s Radeon X1950 Pro is quieter than the GeForce 7600 GT/7900 GS from NVIDIA. In fact it runs nearly as silent as the cooler on the GeForce 7900 GTX we’ve grown to love so much.

The CrossFire connectors

Low profile ducted cooling

Connectivity options on ATI’s Radeon X1950 Pro are quite robust, particularly for a mainstream card at the $200 price point. Not only do you get two dual-link DVI connectors, ATI’s X1950 Pro also includes VIVO (video-in/video-out) support. Even NVIDIA’s $400 GeForce 7900 GTX doesn’t support VIVO. ATI’s retail Radeon X1950 Pro cards will also ship with HDCP support, but HDCP isn’t a requirement for ATI’s board partners. Speaking of which, both Connect3D and Gigabyte were able to discuss their plans for their upcoming Radeon X1950 Pro cards with us.

Connect3D Radeon X1950 Pro

Connect3D plans to produce two Radeon X1950 Pro variants, a card with 256MB of memory, the C3D3062, and an X1950 Pro with 512MB of memory, the C3D3063. We weren’t able to get any photos of the 512MB card, but Connect3D passed along the following images of their 256MB card:

Connect3D Radeon X1950 Pro

Box shot

As you can see, it looks like Connect3D is sticking pretty close to ATI’s reference board design for their Radeon X1950 Pro card. Connect3D is using the same single-slot heatsink as ATI, and the board in the above photo looks like pretty similar to the ATI reference card we’re testing today. Connect3D will be incorporating HDCP support into all of their X1950 Pro cards.

Gigabyte GV-RX195P256D-RH

Gigabyte has come up with quite a few changes with their Radeon X1950 Pro card:

Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro

The Gigabyte box

As you can see, Gigabyte has implemented their own custom board design for their Radeon X1950 Pro card, including the usage of all-solid capacitors on the entire board. They’ve also placed the PCI Express power connector slightly higher on the PCB of the board itself, and of course you can’t miss the Zalman cooling.

Rather than rely on ATI’s stock cooler, Gigabyte uses a Zalman VF700-AlCu heatsink/fan unit to cool the RV570 GPU. Zalman’s VF700-AlCu has proven pretty popular with enthusiasts thanks to its solid performance and quiet operation, so we’ll be eager to see how it compares to the cooler used on stock Radeon X1950 Pro cards.

Gigabyte is sticking with the stock Radeon X1950 Pro speeds for their GV-RX195P256D-RH card, and while it will support two dual-link DVI connectors, the board won’t ship with the EEPROM chip that stores the HDCP key, so the card won’t support HDCP. In addition to the card and hardware accessories, Gigabyte is including a copy of the game Call of Juarez with their board.