Gainward Goes Red
Everyone knows about Amazon.com, the giant online retailer that has almost anything you want, from books to music to even groceries. When it comes to the hardware that makes tech enthusiasts go wobbly at the knees, the equivalent has to be Newegg. Naturally it has also become one of our main sources for product pricing and availability. It was also where we first turned to when we wanted a rough estimate of how ATI's Radeon X1950 PRO was doing in the retail market.
Our gut feeling was that the Radeon X1950 PRO was faring reasonably well in the market but of course, we had to have at least some market figures to back that up. So off to Newegg we went and the ATI reference Radeon X1950 PRO was actually on the retailer's top sellers list. It wasn't clear if its list was ranked in order, but the Radeon X1950 PRO was on the first page of that list and the eighth entry from the top (at the point of writing this article). That certainly seems to suggest that sales of the card should be quite respectable. There were also up to 20 different models of the Radeon X1950 PRO available on Newegg, only slightly lesser than the 22 entries for its main rival, the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS. That seems to be an indication of the popularity and availability of this graphics card among many vendors, which is quite unlike the previous SKUs where we've seen offerings only from the usual ATI add-in-board (AIB) partners.
And the list of vendors offering the Radeon X1950 PRO is set to increment by one more, as ATI seems to have managed to get Gainward onboard this bandwagon. It's quite the coup as Gainward has only ever sold NVIDIA products. Whatever the reasons for joining the ATI fold, ATI fans will now get to experience the vendor's daring, overclocked Golden Sample graphics cards. In fact, we have just that card in our labs now and as we expected, Gainward has bolstered the reference Radeon X1950 PRO - it's overclocked and has 512MB of DDR3 memory. Here's a look at the striking Golden Sample version of the Radeon X1950 PRO from Gainward:
This Golden Sample is so new that it's not even on Gainward's website yet. Here's the retail packaging courtesy of Gainward.
|
Gainward Radeon X1950 PRO 512MB Technical Specifications
| Graphics
Engine |
- ATI Radeon X1950 GPU
- 330 million
transistors on 80nm fabrication process
- Core Clock: 630MHz
- 36 pixel shader
processors
- 12 pixel pipelines
- 8 vertex shader
processors
- Ring Bus Memory
Controller
- 512-bit internal
ring bus for memory reads
- Programmable
intelligent arbitration logic
- 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
- Z/stencil cache
optimized for real-time shadow rendering
- 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
- 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
- Multiple Render
Target (MRT) support
- Render to vertex
buffer support
- 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)
- Flexible
display support
- 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
|
| Graphics
Memory
|
- 256-bit 8-channel
GDDR3 memory interface
- 512MB DDR3 SDRAM
- Memory Clock = 1450MHz
DDR
|
| RAMDAC |
- Dual
integrated dual-link DVI transmitters
- DVI 1.0 compliant /
HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready
- Dual
integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
|
| I/O Faceplate
Connectors
|
- 1 x DVI-I connector
(HDCP Support)
- 1 x VGA analog output
- 1 x mini-DIN connector
|
| Drivers &
Software |
- Driver support for
Windows 98 / Me / 2000 / XP
- CyberLink DVD Solution
|
| Other Information
|
- Dynamic
Voltage Control
- At
least 450W PSU recommended
- Native
PCI Express x16 bus interface
|
Singapore
Malaysia
Philippines
Thailand
Australia 
Channels
TECH GUIDES
By 
