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HEXUS.beans :: ATI hammer out new GT - but is less more ?

by Fanny Deeplung on 6 September 2006, 18:42

Tags: ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qagp7

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Somehow, over the awful noise given off by the cooling fans on its previous mid-range graphics cards, ATI seem to have listened to the likes of HEXUS' very own Ryszard Sommerfeldt and decided that silence is, in fact, golden ... and essential - with some of its partners such as HIS already clocking this situation with their IceQ range.

So when is an X1900GT not an X1900GT? It appears that ATI will be making some tweaks under the hood...

My Willy has been off in the Far East again looking for juicy stories and came back after his usual Deeplung investigations and came back a rather interesting plateful of Beanz...

ATI seems set to be making the following changes - the reference core clock on the X1900GT will drop by almost 100MHz, whilst ramping up the ram speed by the same amount

Why?

Well this gives almost identical performance numbers to the "old" GT, but with less heat being churned out, thereby enabling almost silent performance and the promise of a MASSIVE overhead for overclockers

Less is more? Odd?

HEXUS Labs will be finished with its analysis shortly, and we'll report back if Willy was reading between the lines, or being fed them ;-)


HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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Posted by MadduckUK - Wed 06 Sep 2006 19:31
any hardware differences tho? sounds like something anoyone who's heard the word “overclock” could do..
Posted by awm - Wed 06 Sep 2006 21:10
Bizzare. I would expect ATI to create at least 3 new SKUs out of this idea sicne it has been at least a week since the last “new” products.
Posted by chrestomanci - Thu 07 Sep 2006 15:27
If ATI wanted to go for quiet graphics cards, it is suppressing that they did not incorporate much more mobile technology to do it. I have a laptop fitted with an X1600 mobile GPUs, and it is very quiet and frugal. According to reviews, the GPU will reduce its clock speed, de-activate some parts of the chip, and reduce the number of PCI express lanes in use, all to save power and heat. If ATI where serous about making their desktop graphics cards cool and quiet, they would implement the same technology on them. They have after all already solved those problems.

Compare this to what has been happening to CPUs. Intel has gone from hot and power hungry processors (Prescott) to cool and frugal ones (core) by transplanting mobile technology to the desktop. AMD CPUs also have dynamic clock scaling, though they have not shouted about it so much.
Posted by kalniel - Thu 07 Sep 2006 15:37
*nods* I think GPUs will eventually follow CPUs, but at the moment speed rules (and it's actual noticable speed, unlike p4's). The moment we have graphics cards that are routinely more powerful than we need I think they will switch to power/heat as a selling point.
Posted by sunnyg - Mon 11 Sep 2006 15:14
ye. the gpu these days are becoming more and more similar at the top end. maybe a few miliseconds or frames differece. companied will have to look at other factors other than speed.