[Review]GeCube X1950 Pro Champion Edition

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GeCube X1950 Pro Champion Edition



Introduction

A few months ago ATI introduced their new Radeon X1950 Pro series of video cards. These cards are based on the new RV570 core which is made in a 80nm process. Usually all higher end cards are made to specifications of ATI and the boards partners have to sell that product, they are not allowed to make any changes to the PCB, clock speeds or memory configuration. Recently ATI has lifted that limitation from the X1950 Pro series, which is why we are seeing a number of different products from manufacturers.

GeCube has focused on cooling and overclocking with their FZ Cool Champion Edition. A small TEC (Thermo-Electric-Cooling) device reduces the GPU temperature more than it would be possible with a traditional cooling fan.

A TEC is basically at heat pump. Heat is moved from one side of the metal surface to the other side, it does not magically destroy heat. This whole process consumes power so the hot side is hotter than what was moved from the cold side.



Complete Specifications

Features

* 384 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process
* Up to 48 pixel shader processors
* 8 vertex shader processors
* Up to 256-bit 8-channel GDDR4 memory interface
* Native PCI Express x16 bus interface

Ring Bus Memory Controller

* Up to 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads
* Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs
* Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
* Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)
* Fast Z-Buffer Clear
* Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine

* Support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
* Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations
* Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads
* Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control
* Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency
* 3Dc+ texture compression o High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats
* High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats
* Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0


Advanced Image Quality Features

* 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline
* Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
* 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline
* Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
* 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
* Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling
* New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes
* Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode
* Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
* 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
* Up to 128-tap texture filtering
* Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options
* High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

Avivo™ Video and Display Platform

* High performance programmable video processor
* Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding
* DXVA support
* De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
* Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion
* Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
* 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion)
* Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
* HDR tone mapping acceleration
* Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output
* Flexible display support
* Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters
* DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready*
* Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
* 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output
* Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color)
* Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display
* High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs
* Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
* Xilleon™ TV encoder for high quality analog output
* YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays
* Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays
* Fast, glitch-free mode switching
* VGA mode support on all outputs
* Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
* Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550

CrossFire™

* Multi-GPU technology
* Four modes of operation:
* Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance)
* Supertiling (optimal load-balancing)
* Scissor (compatibility)
* Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality)




Packaging




GeCube put their Champion Edition card into a HUGE box. Look at the box contents image below this paragraph to realize that the cooler pretty much covers the whole card. Now look back at the window in the box, you can see the whole cooler. Obviously this means that the package has a lot of empty space. It seems bigger box means more sales.





Contents





Inside the box you will find:

* Video Card
* Driver CD, Power DVD CD
* Component TV adapter, TV out cable
* 2x DVI Adapter
* PCI-E Power Adapter
* PCI slot bracket



The Card










A Closer Look






The X1950 Pro uses ATI's new internal CrossFire connector. No longer do you need a chunky external dongle cable. A little bridge PCB, just like NVIDIA's SLI lets you connect two card to increase performance or image quality.




As memory Samsung 1.2 ns GDDR3 memory with the model number K4J52324QC-BJ12 is used, which should be good for around 833 MHz.




-Test System


CPU: AMD Athlon64 FX-60 @ 2900 MHz (Toledo, 2x 1024 KB Cache)

Motherboard: Sapphire PC-A9RD580 ATI Radeon XPRESS 3200

Memory: 2x 1024MB G.Skill F1-4000BIU2-2GBHV CL3

Harddisk: WD Raptor 360GD 36 GB

Power Supply: OCZ GameXStream 700W

Software: Windows XP SP2

Drivers: NVIDIA: 91.47 // ATI: Catalyst 6.11




* All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
* All games were set to their highest quality setting

Three resolutions were tested per benchmark:

* 1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing, No anisotropic filtering. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
* 1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing, 8x anisotropic filtering. Common resolution for most gamer flatscreens today. A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
* 1600 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing, 16x anisotropic filter. Highest non-widescreen resolution available to a wide range of users. Very good looking driver graphics settings.
* 2048 x 1536, 4x Anti-aliasing, 16x anisotropic filter. Highest non-widescreen resolution available to any consumer video card. Very good looking driver graphics settings.





-3DMark05










-Far Cry













-FEAR













-Power consumption


Cooling modern video cards is becoming more and more difficult, especially when users are asking for quiet cooling solutions. That's why the engineers are now paying much more attention to power consumption of new video card designs.

To measure power consumption the whole system's mains power draw was measured. This means that these numbers include CPU, Memory, HDD, Video card and PSU inefficiency.

The load value was obtained by running 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. While the test was running, power consumption was recorded. The highest reading is listed in the following graph.





The Gecube X1950 Pro Champion Edition is basically a power hog because of the TEC. However, even with our overclocked FX-60 the total system peak power consumption is below 250W which means that any 400W PSU should be able to run it without problems.





Overclocking



The card does not use distinct 2D/3D clocks. It always runs at 574 MHz core and 682 MHz memory.

ATITool does not work on this card (yet), so we used ATITool "Scan for Artifacts" in conjunction with ATI WinClk 5.22 to find the maximum clocks manually. Actually ATITool core clock changes work, but when you try to start Find Max it will try to change the memory clock as well and crash the card...





In the end the card runs completely stable at 682 MHz Core (19 % overclock) and 816 MHz Memory (20 % overclock). Both overclocks are breathtaking, I haven't seen such overclocking potential on any video card in a stock configuration for quite a while.




Conclusion


The Radeon X1950 Pro series is a great choice for people who do not want to spend too much money at this time, yet they want a card that can run all games at acceptable settings. In our testing we saw that the GeCube X1950 Pro could run everything we threw at it, even at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF. So it is safe to say that this card will last you far into 2007, until it is more clear what's happening with Vista, DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0.
The TEC FZ Cool cooling of Gecube's card works well, but tends to make the card a bit noisy because it uses two fans. Unfortunately only one fan is temperature controlled, the other fan is running at constant speed. Since there is no overclocking tool that works with the X1950 Pro at this time you are limited to using CCC overclocks or BIOS editing. With CCC you can pretty much max. out the available clock range which makes this a simple thing to overclock if you just want to set a clock and be done with it.
The price premium of $30 over a regular 512 MB X1950 Pro that you pay for the TEC module is justified if you are willing to trade a bit more fan noise for huge overclocking potential.




Review completa >> http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/GeCube/X1950Pro_Champion/1


cumps
 
Ainda gasta bem a gráfica.. Mas continuo com a minha opinião, mais um show off, e talvez o mais rapido a desaparecer na historia, visto que o Dx10 e as gráficas Dx10 ou já se encontram disponiveis ou então (ati) estão a sair.. Pelos preços retail, que devem de ser perto dos 400 dollars, ou 370's, mais vale comprar uma 8800gts, ao menos suporta Dx10, e presumo que esta grafica use Crossfire como metodo de processar como default?

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