14 DAY TRIAL // An early sample of ATI's upcoming Radeon X1950 Pro graphics card has been obtained by DailyTech. The card was expected to arrive next week; however, ATI has pushed the launch date back to the last week of October. Radeon X1950 Pro is based on ATI's RV570 graphics core that is one of ATI's first products manufactured on an 80nm fabrication process, and is completely separate from the existing Radeon X1950 video cards released earlier this year.
The Radeon X1950 Pro features 36 pixel shaders and 12 pipelines on a new core that is essentially a stripped down R580. This early sample is clocked at 575 MHz core and 686 MHz GDDR3 memory, a bit slower compared to the previously reported 580 MHz core and 700 MHz memory of ATI reference boards. However, this is a retail vendor sample, and each vendor will clock according to its own specifications.
This unit was a basic model with 256MB of graphics memory that lacks HDCP support. Dual-DVI outputs are available, though neither output is dual-link capable. An ATI Rage Theater is integrated for VIVO capabilities similar to the higher end Radeon X1900XT/XTX and X1950XTX cards. As this is only a reference board, graphics card manufacturers are free to integrate dual-link DVI and HDCP support. The card still requires a 6-pin PCI Express power connector.
As for the new things with the Radeon X1950 Pro, we can find the inclusion of an internal CrossFire connector. ATI has integrated the CrossFire compositing engine into the graphics core itself. Communication between two graphics cards in CrossFire is performed through an internal CrossFire connector. The internal CrossFire connector is expected to ship with the graphics card and be a ribbon type cable, similar to some SLI bridge connectors. Also, the Radeon X1950 Pro has a new single-slot cooler. The new cooler is similar to the unit used on Radeon X1950XTX graphics cards, at half the width.
Tested, the X1950 pro has proved to be slightly better than the X1900XT 256 MB model, but obviously the performance of X1950XTX is the greatest of them all, sometimes at a double score in some benchmarks. As for the power consumption, it manages to consume 225 W (that's 54 W less than the X1900XT 256 MB model).