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Radeon X1900XTX Round Up 

PCI Express x16 graphics cards
Chipset Radeon X1900XTX 512 MB, 256 bit

Three months have passed since ATI launched their Radeon X1900 series. At launch, most of their AIB partners announced their own respective products based on this new chip. Understandably, in a hurry to get the product out of the door, most partners opt to stick to the reference design, right down to the use of the slightly revised, yet notorious Radeon X1800 cooling solution. Three months down the road, we're finally seeing some variety between vendors, most notably the use of a higher clocked core / memory and / or third party cooling solutions.

However, for users outside the US and Europe, the only Radeon X1900 series that's available are only those with stock cooling and reference specification from ATI's partners. Furthermore, users in some regions and countries have not seen any ripple effect from ATI's price cut when the GeForce 7900 series came out. Prices for these cards are terribly high, and in some extreme cases can reach USD 600 - 700 per card for the Radeon X1900XTX  Higher clocked cards with third party solutions are more likely to be sold higher.

Unfortunately, we are one of those users. So, you can probably can already guess the conclusion of this comparison. We have three cards to test in this article, the ASUS EAX1900XTX, Gigabyte Radeon X1900XTX and Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX. All these cards use reference boards with reference specifications. So, in short, they're all the same. Our conclusion is not that different from the early comparisons done when the Radeon X1900XTX was launched.  Even testing for overclocking potential would be pointless, especially if all the vendors use the same core revision and memory chips.

So why write this article at all then? That's a valid question. Well, first of all, we did expect a higher clocked version to be out in three months, at least from several vendors that's available in this part of the world. Unfortunately, that's not the case. So we have to make this comparison with the cards that's available now. Hopefully we can get our hands on one in the next few weeks to see what kind of performance can you expect and update this article.

The second reason is more complicated. After testing Oblivion, we saw that current high end cards (both the GeForce 7900GTX and Radeon X1900XTX) have barely enough power to push high enough frame rates in that game. Sure Oblivion is a special case, but the game really put what these cards have to offer into perspective. These cards are only fast enough for the current generation of games. So, if the fastest card today have barely enough power (a single card, not SLI or Crossfire), why pay more? If there are no differences in performance (and cooling solution) between vendors, which card should you buy? Ultimately, that option is up to you. In this article, we try to look at the differences between these three cards and their bundles to see which one has the best overall product, not just the cards.

Overview

ASUS EAX1900XTX
650/775 MHz

ATI Radeon X1900XTX, 512 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 648 MHz
Memory Clock : 774 MHz (1548 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 90 points

The ASUS EAX1900XTX is the card with the largest box in this round up.Most of the space inside the box is used by the packaging, mainly used to keep things stationary and does a pretty good job of it. Unfortunately, it looks like our samples have been making quite some rounds, so there's some accessories missing. So, we had to refer to ASUS's website documentation on the bundle. Besides the usual cable accessories (S-video, video input / output, HDTV and composite cables), you'll also find two DVI to analog dongles (a necessary bonus if you're going to use two analog displays) and a leather CD wallet. Unfortunately, there's no 6 pin ATX power cables for your recently purchased graphics cards, so you'll have to make sure your power supply has one or buy a third party solution. While this may not be a big deal to most of us with new power supplies, we can see how this may irk some users with older power supply. After all, with the price ASUS is asking for this card, you think they would've put something as small but still significant item like a power cable as a standard bundle.

The CD bundle is the usual fan fare: a driver CD, a manual CD and with two applications CD, a DVD playback software and Video editor / capture software to make use of the card's video input capabilities. For those who want to get down to business of enjoying their recent purchase, ASUS was kindly enough to supply two popular games: King Kong and Project Snowblind and several other games, in total about 5 games.

In the utilities CD, you'll find some of the usual ASUS utility fan fare, the GameFace Messenger, Game LiveShow and Video Security Online. If you install the extra ASUS Enhanced Driver, you'll also get Splendid, a color enhancing utility and ASUS On Screen Display, which enables you to quickly adjust your display properties (brightness, contrast etc) via an OSD display you can call through a hot key.

No doubt, the ASUS EAX1900XTX is the card with the most bundle in this round up. However, that amount of games and software becomes a moot point with the lack of power cables. Why put all that effort into a bundle when left out such a small but very important  thing as a power cable? After all, you can't really play all these games or use all that utilities if you can't hook the card up with the power supply.

Gigabyte X1900XTX
650/775 MHz

ATI Radeon X1900XTX, 512 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 648 MHz
Memory Clock : 774 MHz (1548 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 90 points

This is actually the second time around the Gigabyte Radeon X1900XTX make its way into our hands. The first time was several weeks ago for our Radeon X1900XTX review. Thankfully, there's nothing missing inside the box. You'll find the all the necessary accessories and the graphics card tucked away pretty neatly inside. You'll find the usual fanfare of cables - HDTV, composite, S-Video, video input / output - in addition to two DVI to analog dongles. Now here's the interesting part, it seems that the 6 pin ATX power cables is an optional accessory, so you may or may not get it, depending on where you live and purchase the card from. Thankfully, the local distributor here assured us that they will be including the power cables inside the box. So, it would be wise to check with your local Gigabyte representative / distributors to see whether or not you will get one if you decide to buy this card.

The must have CDs are all there - a driver CD which include a DVD playback software  plus an additional CD with MediaShow to utilize the video input capabilities of the card. You'll also get two games - Counter Strike: Condition Zero and Xpand Rally. A little bit outdated, but it's better than nothing. Unlike their previous graphics card products, the Gigabyte Radeon X1900XTX does not include any proprietary utilities, so you'll have to resort to third party utilities such as ATI Tool if you want to overclock the card or use the Overdrive feature inside the Catalyst Control Center.

In a way, Gigabyte's Radeon X1900XTX is a pretty standard card. It may not have more in terms in bundles, but it came with all the necessary accessories. Of course, like we said earlier, if you need the 6 pin ATX power cable, contact your local distributor on whether or not the cable is a standard package or an optional accessory. While you can easily get the cable from any store selling PC components, it would be a real time saver to have it inside the box.

Sapphire X1900XTX
650/775 MHz

ATI Radeon X1900XTX, 512 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 648 MHz
Memory Clock : 774 MHz (1548 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 92 points

This is actually the first time we tested a Sapphire graphics card and we're quite pleased with what Sapphire had to offer with their Radeon X1900XTX. It's no Toxic, but it has all the necessary accessories and provide some extra flexibility in bundles. First of, the accessories. You'll find the standard HDTV, composite, S-Video and video input / output cables inside, of course, a 6 pix ATX power cable is also included. There's also two DVI to analog dongles if you want to hook up two analog monitors. Even though it has the smallest box of the three, Sapphire manages to have a very neat packaging despite the fact that it only use two layers of foam to protect the graphics card.

As per usual, there's a driver CD and two applications CD - Cyberlink's PowerDVD and PowerDirector for DVD playback and video capture / editor purposes. You'll also find a DVD with four games inside: Brothers in Arms, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, Richard Burns Rally and Tony Hawk's Underground. These are all full games, but with each card, you'll get two activation keys, one for each game. It's up to you to choose which one you like the most. What's so great about this is the flexibility. If you should ever want to buy another card, perhaps for another PC or maybe a Crossfire setup, you can use the additional two keys for the other two games. So you'll end up with four games instead of two copies of two games. Even if you only buy a single card, you can at least play the other two games to see whether or not you like them or not.

In this regard, we think Sapphire has the best bundle, though it lack the total number of game bundles the ASUS EAX1900XTX has. It also comes standard with a 6 pin ATX power cable, which is a necessity if you have a power supply that does not have one. Of course, this differences are small, but they are worth noting. If you already have a power supply with a 6 pix ATX power cables, then you should consider other factors, such as price and support.

Performance

As usual, we'll be focusing on performance under default settings and 4x AA with 16x AF. Since all of these cards are basically the same, we expect very little difference between them, if any. Due to a technical difficulty, there won't be any results from F.E.A.R, but performance wise it shouldn't be that much different to the results we got in our Radeon X1900XTX review.

We'd like to thank both Tagan and Kingston for supplying the additional power supply and 1 GB memory modules for this article.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939
2 x 1024 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 6.2 reference driver
NVIDIA Forceware 84.21reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.66 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c

The graphs are pretty self explanatory, but in case you can't see the text, they're arranged in groups of three colors: green for minimum fps, blue for average fps and red for maximum fps. The first group represent test results under default settings, and the second represent results with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled.These results are in frame rate per second.

Standard settings

The results:

As we expected, there's very little difference between the cards. If there are any differences, they can be attributed to normal variations between runs (1-2 fps). More so here, since we're basically system limited with the Radeon X1900XTX, even with AA and AF enabled. You can also see the cards behaving in a similar manner - at 1280 x 1024 we begin to see a slight dip in performance with AA and AF and this becomes more noticeable at 1600 x 1200.  You can also see  that we didn't went lower than the minimum fps of around 70 fps, even at 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF. The lower average frame rates is more affected by the lower maximum fps rather than the minimum fps.


No doubt, we're severely system limited here - there's virtually no difference between 1024 x 768 and 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF. There are some slight drops in performance, but they're not really noticeable, even at 1600 x 1200. While looking at an fps progress graph might give us a clue where the difference lay, in the end it really doesn't make that much of a difference. All the cards are again behaving very similar to each other, as expected. Even right to the slight, 3 fps drop at 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF.


This another system limited benchmark, it's not until we hit 1280 x 1024 do the Radeon X1900XTXs begin to sweat with the burden of AA and AF. At 1600 x 1200, the difference between default settings and AA / AF is more noticeable and significant, though the frame rates are high enough for very fluid gameplay. Except for the maximum fps, the frame rates we're getting out of the three cards are identical. Again, this is not surprising since these cards are all based on the reference board and has the same exact specifications.


It's easy to judge this benchmark is totally system limited, but if you look at the minimum fps, that's not entirely true. We see a steady decline as we move with higher resolutions and enabling AA and AF. There's is some variations here, but it's still can be attributed to normal variations between runs (1-2 fps). No doubt, by now you'll see a definite trend - all Radeon X1900XTX with the same core and memory clock will give you identical levels of performance.


We thought we saw a difference with the Gigabyte Radeon X1900XTX in this benchmark, but as testing progresses, we saw that we're mistaken. The slightly slower scores at 1024 x 768 is again caused by normal variations between runs. At higher resolutions, the performance is again identical between all three cards.


Rather than repeatedly stating the obvious, we'll just let the graphs speak for themselves. 


Virtually the same.


OK. We all saw how there's really no difference in performance between these three cards (or all Radeon X1900XTXs with same core and memory clock, for that matter). Even those with slightly higher core and memory clock, like the Sapphire Toxic line, are still based on the same reference design. So, it all comes down to the cooling solution, bundle and price. 

Since all these cards have the same reference cooling solution, the only noticeable differences between them are bundle and price. Looking at the bundle, all three cards pretty much came with the standard bundle. Even the cables are pretty much the same. The only noticeable difference is the game bundle on the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX. If you're vying for a Crossfire setup, the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX bundle is the most flexible  - you'll get four different games, instead of two games, two CD's for each game. However, this is a moot point if you're only getting one card.

On an even more subjective mode, out of these three cards, we like the way Sapphire packaged their card. The box is the smallest of all three, very neatly packed and the card is very well protected with soft foams on both sides. Indeed, the outer foam is very thin, but since the reference cooling already serves as a 'buffer' to keep the electrical components out of harm's way. This is a moot point and like we said, a subjective note but we think it's nice to mention.

Price wise, these cards is again not that much different from each other. Of course, price is also subject to variations - like where do you get it from, where are you located and so on. So, we can't really make our evaluation based on price. While this may make comparison very difficult, if not impossible, there's a good thing we can learn from making this comparison. No matter what Radeon X1900XTX you buy, you'll guaranteed to have the same performance, features. So, it's really up to the price and your own brand / retailer preference.

Conclusion:

In all honesty, we really can't recommend one card over the others in this comparison. Does that mean we don't recommend all these cards? No, in fact we recommend all these cards, but like we said, we can't really recommend one card more over the other. All these cards offer the same level of performance, with virtually the same bundle (some differences in choice, but not quantity). Personally, if we had to choose, it would be the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX - but the differences are moot and very subjective.

For you, the choice may and can be be different. Looking ahead, we think it's best to choose the card you will be more comfortable with. Factors you should consider are price and support. With all Radeon X1900XTX basically offering the same performance and features, getting one that's a little bit cheaper is definitely worth it. Just make sure the retailer is trustworthy and offer good support if god forbid, something bad happens to your card (during use or shipping).

There's also another reason why we recommend factoring price into your buying decision. With the amount of money you save, you would be wise to spend it on one of the available third party cooling solutions. Then you wouldn't have to stand the howling sound these reference cooled cards produces at heavy loads and system startups. It also makes more sense for overclockers out there - if you're dead set on replacing the cooling solution anyway, why pay more money for the practically the same card?

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