HBlog - Hardware Blog

First INQpression Water-cooling makes X1900XTX performs like X1950XTX

THE SAPPHIRE Toxic X1900 XTX card is the first water-cooling serial produced card that had all you need in the package. Sapphire is getting ready for a new one based on the X1950 XTX card, the one that runs with faster memory, but interestingly enough we proved that even Sapphire Toxic X1900 XTX has still a lot of steam.

The card is clocked at 675MHz core and 1600 Hz memory. The original X1900 XTX works at 650 MHz and 1550 MHz memory. The card has sixteen pipelines, forty eight pixel shaders just like every R580 based card.

Let’s focus on the cooling. The R580 core is cowered with a water block. Two tubes get the water in and out of that water block and the both tubes are connected to a huge radiator / pump / reservoir part. The Radiator / pump / reservoir part looks like a second graphic card. You can plug it to a free slot in your PC. A radiator has a fan that cools the radiator and the water in it. It has two modes that you can change via simple switcher. One is silent mode that runs cooler slower but still does the job and second is performance one that give you more cooling juice if you overclock. Memory don’t mind that is just passively cooled it works well at 1600 MHz.

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AMD has completed its purchase of ATI. It spent $4.3bn in cash and 58m AMD shares on the graphics chip company, taking on $2.5bn in debt to help pay for it all. Farewell, the ATI, retained only as a product brand.

And with acquisition comes integration. AMD said it plans to announce a number of platforms next year that will combine its processor technology with ATI’s GPU designs, as Intel Centrino-like platforms.
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The future of CPU/GPU computing

With the completion of AMD’s acquisition of ATI, AMD has announced its working on new CPU/GPU silicon that integrates the CPU and graphics processor into a single unit. The upcoming silicon is currently codenamed Fusion and is expected in the late 2008 or early 2009 time frame. AMD claims Fusion will bring:

AMD intends to design Fusion processors to provide step-function increases in performance-per-watt relative to today’s CPU-only architectures, and to provide the best customer experience in a world increasingly reliant upon 3D graphics, digital media and high-performance computing. With Fusion processors, AMD will continue to promote an open platform and encourage companies throughout the ecosystem to create innovative new co-processing solutions aimed at further optimizing specific workloads. AMD-powered Fusion platforms will continue to fully support high-end discrete graphics, physics accelerators, and other PCI Express-based solutions to meet the ever-increasing needs of the most demanding enthusiast end-users.
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