A Closer Look

The cooler is a one-slot cooling solution. Its base plate is fairly simple and uses thermal pads to achieve contact with the memory. Even though the pads are rather thick, there is quite some memory overclocking potential left in this card as you will find out later.


With the cooler removed you can see that the card follows today's standard layout: eight memory chips spread around the GPU in the center.


Since the X1950 GT does draw quite some power, an additional PCI-E power connector is required for operation of the card.


256 Megabytes of Samsung 1.2 ns GDDR3 memory are used on this card. GDDR4 would be much too expensive for this price range and does not offer that many benefits over GDDR3.


The GPU used is the RV570 Revision A12. I wonder what the little X stands for on the GPU.