ATI Radeon X1K Refresh: X1950 XTX, X1900 XT 256MB, X1650 Pro, and X1300 XT

Although there has obviously been a lot going on behind the scenes at ATI these last few months, i.e. the proposed AMD merger, the company has remained relatively quiet.  The last major graphics card launch was for the Radeon X1900 family back in January.  And since then, the company has released only a couple of mid-range graphics cards that utilized existing GPU technology.  Today, however, ATI is announcing five new products targeting virtually every segment of the graphics market.

At the high-end ATI is announcing the Radeon X1950 XTX and Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire Edition cards. The new flagship features essentially the same GPU found on the older Radeon X1900 XTX, but the X1950 XTX is the first consumer level graphics card equipped with ultra-fast GDDR4 RAM. The RAM on the Radeon X1950 XTX is actually clocked at 1GHz, for an effective clock speed of 2GHz.

For performance enthusiasts on a budget, ATI is announcing a new 256MB Radeon X1900 XT and for the mainstream and entry-level market segments, the company has the Radeon X1650 Pro and Radeon X1300 XT on tap.  We've got details regarding all of these cards on the proceeding pages, but for now let's lay some groundwork and refer you to some previous HotHardware articles relevant to today's announcement. 

There is a myriad of information related to today's launch already available on our site that will help you get familiar with the GPU architectures and key features employed on the cards we'll be showcasing here. The Radeon X1950 XTX has a number of features in common with other cards in the Radeon X1K family of products, and we've detailed the features of the Radeon Xpress 3200 chipset and ATI's CrossFire multi-GPU technology in a few past articles as well.

• AMD & ATI Merger: Questions and Answers
• ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 Chipset Evaluation
• Radeon X1900 CrossFire Evaluation
• Radeon X1800 CrossFire Evaluation
• Radeon X1K Family Review 
• ATI Crossfire Multi-GPU Technology Preview

At a minimum, if you haven't already done so, we recommend scanning through our CrossFire Multi-GPU technology preview, the CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset evaluation, the X1K family review, and the Radeon X1900 CrossFire evaluation. In those four articles, we cover the vast majority of the features offered by the Radeon X1950 XTX and the other cards being announced today. There is quite a bit of background information in those articles that laid the foundation for what we're going to showcase here today.

Digg it