The Card
The Diamond Multimedia Viper X1950PRO is based on the R570 GPU which is an 80nm chip from ATI. The card was the replacement for the X1900GT which is now well past its prime. ATI was having supply issues of the R580 chip for the GT model, so they ushered in the X1950PRO as a new and more practical solution.


The GPU itself features 36 pixel pipelines and 12 texture units. The X1950XTX features 48 and 16. The core and memory clock run at 575MHz and 1380MHz versus 650MHz and 2000MHz on the X1950XTX. It’s a significant drop but it gives you an idea why there is a huge price difference between ATI’s highest offering and their midrange X1950Pro.


The card itself features the oh-so-common red ATI board; however, it does differ from the standard ATI reference design a bit. At first glance I immediately noticed how heavy this card was; in fact, more so than the 7950GT. The cooler is almost entirely copper and runs nearly the full length of the card on the backside. I don’t know if the need for such a cooler stems from the 512MB of RAM which is double the standard of 256MB, but either way the cooler is impressive.


On the side of the card we see the standard ports for connectivity including two DVI connections and a S-Video connection. I ended up making use of both of these to test a dual monitor setup with a TV and my Samsung 204B.

One of the major features of this overhauled GPU is the now dongle-less CrossFire setup. And on top of that, ATI has now ditched the “master card” necessity allowing any X1950PRO to work in CrossFire with any other X1950PRO. No longer is there a need for the external cable to run between the two cards; instead, they are using a bridge setup much like NVIDIA does with SLi and you don’t have to get specific versions of cards to work together. This is only a positive for ATI and hopefully this will make CrossFire a viable alternative to SLi without the extra hassles from this point on.