Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT

On budget and on fire!

Date reviewed: November 25th, 2006

Author: Christos

The card follows ATI's reference design including the cooler. Sapphire just added their label on the cooler. The 50mm fan is small and will probably create a lot of noise when running at full speed. The heatsink covers all the memory modules with thermal heat pads sealing the gap. The cooler is made out of 2 pieces. The large piece is aluminum and this holds the fan and makes contact with the memory modules. The second piece is copper and this part contacts the core. 2 small heatpipes are soldered onto the copper piece. The card is quite long at 9 inches, hence it wont fit in all cases. We can see the PCI-E power connector, the 2x DVI-I connectors and the TV output. The Samsung memory on the card is rated for 1.4ns for a theoretical max speed of : 1400Mhz.

The back of the card shows all the usual labels, we can see the 4 main screws for the heatsink, and the retention system to apply the pressure on the core. The 4 tiny screws for this retention system were so tight it was difficult to remove them when i replaced the heatsink. But it did make great contact with the core which is very good. Since this is a 256MB card there is no memory on the back.

Here's another picture of the card, we can see the 2 DVI-I connectors and the TV output. You can see that the cooler is not that tall, hence probably won't keep the card as cool as the best aftermarket coolers available, which is to be expected. We can also see the heatsink on the card's voltage regulators.

I included a picture of the card without the cooler, here you can see the core in all it's beauty and the 8 memory modules. I was going to include some close up's of the core and memory but the pictures didn't come out good. This card utilizes ATI's R580 core, which fully supports DirectX 9.0, pixel shader 3.0 and shader model 3.0. The gpu is made on a the 90nm process. The core has two different speeds, when running in 2D mode, the core is running at 500Mhz, but when the card detects a 3D application it jumps up to 575Mhz. The memory remains the same at 600Mhz. The X1900 GT has a diminished core compared to it's bigger brother the X1900 XT. It has only 12 ROP's and 36 pixel shaders compared to 16 & 48in the X1900 XT. But it keeps all 8 vertex shaders. The memory is 256MB of GDDR3 and rides a 256 bit bus

I also contacted ATI and they confirmed that this card DOES NOT have the ROM CHIP with the embedded keys in order to be HDCP compliant.

Ok, enough talking, let's see what this card can do...