Let's get back to the basics for a while. Looking at the card itself, what do we notice? Hey it's a reference design ;) Clean layout, as usual for ATI we see the red PCB. Have a look at the photo's.

Upper Left the X1600 XT, upper right the X1800 XT - Lower left the X1300 Pro and to the lower right the X1800 XL

As it looks most of the products have at least two DVI connectors, which both have dual-link support. Single link connections use one TMDS 165Mhz transmitter, while dual links use two. So you can hook up two extremely high resolution monitors at once to the card. You might think hmm is that needed ? Yes it is. High-Def screens and high-resolution monitors are lurking around the corner.

The dual link DVI pins effectively double the power of transmission and provide an increase of speed and signal quality; i.e. a DVI single link 60-Hz LCD can display a resolution of 1920 x 1080, while a DVI dual link can display a resolution of 2048 x 1536 or higher. All cards have two DVI connectors except the 1300 series which has a CRT/VGA connector.

I think manufacturers will be allowed to make their own choice in the connectors though. So a X1600 XT with one VGA and one DVI connector would not surprize me.

The X1800 XT cooler is a something else for sure. This card weigh easily a pound. Next to that it has a two slot cooling solution. That indicates clearly that the card needs much cooling, and it does. The fan disposes tremendous amounts of heat. The 90nm process obviously allowed a higher clockspeed for this 330 million transistor counting graphics core but that requires, as I am guessing, a lot of voltage.

Something I find less charming regarding all cooling solutions on the entire range of X1000 cards is that the fans are rather noisy. Not terrible but definitely clearly audible during gameplay or when the core temperature rises beyond a certain threshold.

Fact is that you need to exhaust heat from the product in an efficient way. This is why the X1800 XT needs a big two-slot cooler. Not a problem for me at all by the way although I think the single slot solution as presented on the X1800 XL is far more sexy. All HiS products also have the dual slot coolers and I'm perfectly fine with it. But yeah .. single slot is more sexy though ;)

Hmm let me try to explain myself in another way, Dual-slot cooling would be Britney Spears and Single Slot more like Christina Aguillera. The one that is more or less preferred is always topic of discussion. Or would this be single-slut? *cough*