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     What may be the fastest graphics card on the planet has finally made it's way to the ClubOC underground labs located somewhere in the deserts of southern Idaho...  This time our friends at Gigabyte fought there way through sand storms and tumbleweeds to hand deliver this bad boy to us. Within the handcuffed, shiny steel briefcase is an ATi Radeon X1900 XTX Cross Fire with an incredible 512mb of GDDR3 memory. We quickly dismissed the heavily armed men dressed in black so we could get down to testing this card of wonder.

     Have the engineering geniuses locked in Gigabyte's basement created a graphics card that is a must for all serious gamers? I certainly hope so because I hear the Cheetos and Mountain Dew are running seriously low... Poor guys... Well, let's take a look at the X1900 XTX and see if the folks at Gigabyte will be eating steak and lobster or if they will go back to Cheetos and Mountain Dew...

Overview & Features by ATi

Product Introduction
GIGABYTE Technology unleashed the world's fastest graphics accelerators, the GV-RX19X512VB-RH, enabling crazy gaming platform performance. The GV-RX19 series are manufactured with 90 nanometer technology that, together with ATI's new Radeon^® X1900 state-of-the–art architecture, includes an ultra-threaded engine for unparalleled shader performance. Plus, GIGABYTE's monster graphics card, GV-RX19X512VB-RH allow users to experience simultaneous HDR and advanced anti-aliasing for incredible enhancements to lighting contour and color details, delivering the ultimate in visually immersive 3D gaming.

90nm Technology
Faster clocks, double the transistor density of erlier 130 nm technology. 90nm technology helped make X1000 products the most advanced GPUs ever highest clocks speeds, incredible feature integration, full performance and precision all the time, and ability to take advantage of future, higher-speed memories.

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine
*Support for Microsoft^® DirectX^® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
*Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations
*Up to maximum 512 simultaneous pixel threads
*Dedicated brach execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control
*Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency

Ring Bus Memory Technology
*Maximum 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads
*Programmable intelligent arbitration logic
*New cache design
*Improved HyperZ™

RoHS Compliant
As a citizen of the global village, GIGABYTE exert ourselves to be a pioneer in environment care. Give the whole of Earth a promis that our products do not contain any of the restricted substances in concentrations and applications banned by the RoHS Directive, and are capable of being worked on at the higher temperatures required for lead free solder. One Earth and GIGABYTE Cares!

3Dc™
3Dc is an exciting new compression technology designed to bring out fine details in games while minimizing memory usage. It is the first compression technique optimized to work with normal maps, which allow fine per-pixel control over how light reflects from a textured surface. With up to 4:1 compression possible, this means game designers can now include up to 4x the detail without changing the amount of graphics memory required and without impacting performance.

Catalyst™ Control Center
ATI's all-new Catalyst Control Center goes far beyond traditional driver configuration software—it's a feature-rich and stable 3D acceleration control application that puts you in complete command of your ATI visual processing unit (VPU). Catalyst Control Center offers exceptional graphics performance and visual quality for the ultimate in performance, stability, and innovation. Safe GPU overclocking, custom profiles, and assignable hotkeys are just a few of the many new features. You'll also enjoy frequent updates, reliable customer service, and an interactive user feedback program, all backed by ATI's technical confidence, industry-leading capability, and uncompromising commitment to creating your ultimate visual experience.

Avivo™
Avivo™could provide vibrant high fidelity, flawlessly smooth next-generation video playback. Avivo™ technology easily allows your PCs to become digital home media center by its compelling video pipeline design that comprises the latest high definition video hardware acceleration, including H.264 and WMV9.

Cross Fire™
Multiply and Conquer with Multi-GPU Performance: CrossFire's "supertiling" GPU sharing speeds rendering by evenly dividing the graphics processing, intelligently alternating the rendering workload to each Radeon GPU for efficient load balancing, and optimized performance.CrossFire boosts image quality along with rendering speed, eliminating the need to crank down screen resolutions to get the high image quality you want.CrossFire supports a wide range of ATI-based graphics cards and motherboards, and offers compatibility with a broad array of third party components for a flexible and robust solution.

OpenGL 2.0^® Optimizations and Support
Ensure top-notch compatibility and performance for all OpenGL 2.0 application.

Microsoft^® DirectX^® 9.0C
Ensures the best performance and application compatibility for all DirectX 9.0C applications.

Microsoft^® DirectX^® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0
Provide infinite program command length creating photorealistic scenes and environments in games, without compromising overall PC performance.

Dual-link DVI
Dual-link DVI supports any combination of digital and analog display, and independent resolution and refresh rate selection for any two connected displays. Dual Link technology doubles the display bandwidth through a single DVI connection to support ultra-high resolution output and significantly increase productivity.

PCI Express
Designed to run perfectly with the next-generation PCI Express bus architecture. This new bus doubles the bandwidth of AGP 8X delivering over 4 GB/sec. in both upstream and downstream data transfers.

Widescreen resolution support

*Resolutions are limited by the performance of the attached monitor. 16:9 / 16:10 aspect ratio monitors are only supported on Windows^® XP. The complete list of resolutions depends on the driver version and operating system.

Specification