ATI officially launch Radeon X1900 lineup

[CougTek]

Press release.

DailyTech short artcile with pretty pictures. They also post links to a few reviews.

Personally, I'm no fan of dual-slot cooling solution and I don't like to deal with an external cable to setup a Crossfire configuration. So I'm fairly unimpressed with ATI's recent high-end cards.

 

[MaxBurn]

Isn't there an external power supply involved too? Or isn't that the super high end one only? Whatever, I rather like nvidia at the moment for 3D. At least they can deliver product to people (for the moment anyway).

 

[Mercutio]

I'm sure the damned thing sounds like a leafblower, but being a 16xPCIe card, at least all that cooler is blocking is a useless 1xPCIe slot.

The thing that strikes me most is how completely fucking insane the PC hardware press is about this hardware. This is a $500 part, and they're talking about it like it's a mainstream essential for gaming, while just released X1600s and X1800s - plenty fast and still plenty expensive, I note - are relegated to the dustbin.

I think I resent the tone of every article I've just read. They're ALL like that.

 

[sechs]

I just upgraded to an X850 XT which has a similar looking two-slot cooler. Except for at startup, the fan is really quite quiet -- and I've run the GPU above 55C. And it doesn't dump all of that heat inside my case. If this new card has the same setup, I don't see that as an issue.

The problem with Crossfire isn't so much the external cables, but that you have to go through that effort *and* you still have to get an ATi-based motherboard. There aren't any really good reasons that Crossfire can't work on any board that has the appropriate slots (say, one of nVidia's SLI chipset boards) -- but it doesn't.

If you consider that the latest and greatest video card is the hottest thing since the previous and now not-so-great video card, you can understand (and therefore ignore) the hype.