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ATI's new Radeon X1000 series of Graphics cards
The all new X1300 Pro, X1600 XT, 1800 XL and 1800 XT cards reviewed!
October 5th, the day has finally arrived. Yes indeed, ATI today proudly launched its newborn kids and I did say kids not kid as it is not just one product release this time. Gosh golly darn it; it surely took them a while because hey most of us really did expect the new R520 series in May or June. What was the delay you ask? Yeah you guessed right, it was a bug in the chip design. It affected both the R520 (X1800)and R530 (X1600). I'll get geeky immediately, basically it boiled down to a pin sending out a logic 1 where it should have been sending a 0. If the frequency of the core went up with a rating over 500 MHz the transmission gate of the graphics core would load itself up with incorrect numbers and thus corrupted data. One of the needle in a haystack things I guess. It took ATI a while to find what was the design flaw in the new chip, yet once they actually did find the issue, it took less than 24 hours to fix it, after which the ball started rolling. It's good they found it since as soon as the results came back they instantly could clock the fastest product 100/150 MHz faster, not too shabby eh? Ladies and gentlemen, today we see the rise and shine of ATI's latest.
Let me keep it short though, in today's article we'll present you the entire range of the series X1000 products. Bad news though. Today we will only present you the results of three products where it should have been four. The raw beast of the series was broken, yes it is the potent and most of all impressive Radeon X1800 XT equipped with no less than 512 MB of the latest gDDR3 memory. What bad luck I had.
So were the rumors that you heard over the past few weeks correct? Yeah, most of them were. For the entry product range ATI has introduced the low-level X1300 (codename RV515) series, for the mid range (mainstream) products the X1600 (R530) series and for the true high-end geeks like yours truly of course an animal in the wild kingdom that we call the graphics card arena, yes the X1800 (R520) series. It does not end there, these three series among them have several other products within each range and that's where the rumors were right. It's the Pro, XL and XT products. A top to bottom family of new products from ATI. Exciting, new and performing well.
On the next page we'll give you a brief introduction of the new products and their specifications, then we'll talk a little about the new technology, a quick look into the new technology demo's, do a photo shoot and then will go into the benchmarking part of this article. Ladies and gentlemen please fasten your seatbelts you are about to take off with the ATI X1000 series of graphics cards.
** This article was updated, Radeon X1800 XT results are now also included.
That's a solar eclipse right there, it was a photo I took at precisely the last minute I ended my visit with ATI last Monday.
