ATI X1950XTX Tops Its Own Fastest 3D GPU ever!

I am mad at ATI! In fact I'm also quite miffed at Mr. Moore or whatever the guy's name was who came up with Moore's Law.

You see, it was only last April I was the first kid on my block to own ATI's fastest 3D video card ever made, the X 1900 XTX. I thought, according to Moore's Law, I had at least a year and a half before it was made obsolete by incoming new versions of ATI's Radeon 3D GPUs. ATI didn't tell me in April they were going to stab me in the back in four short months! Now I have to throw that old video card in the garbage and pony up the $450 asking price for the new card.

You've been warned Mr. Moore! Slow this incessant progress in the processor performance or I am going to go broke. When that happens I'm just going to give up buying the latest, greatest graphics card ever made. Mark my words!

Alright. That joke is getting old. My 1900 is in no danger of going obsolete by the presence of its more advanced X 1950 XTX brethren introduced just yesterday by ATI, but the new card will ship on Sept. 14th. ATI believes this one will offer the highest frame-rates of any 3D graphics accelerator on the market. It includes the obligatory crossfire version of the card for SLI mode. (SLI is where you run two of them in parallel to expand the graphics performance by some 30%.)

The X 1950 XTX has a 648MHZ GPU and 512MB of the new GDDR4 memory that operates at a speedy 2GHZ. ATI has also improved the fan/heat sink combo since they developed my noisy X1900XTX. Actually, I like the sound of jet engines firing up, it's a power rush that makes me feel like Ice Man from Top Gun - flying into the 100 fps overclocked danger zone, baby! So, the new quieter fan doesn't mean much to me, honestly. But, according to ATI, the new X 1950 XTX will feature a much quieter fan, which is good I guess - if you're into that sort of thing.

You can check out all the specs at ATI's site.

3 comments
Posted by Dave on August 30,2006 at 9:27 AM
This issue is what has caused me many times to delay indefinitely buying new technology.  I just continually think that if I only wait another couple months,  something faster and possibly cheaper will come out.....
Posted by DumbWaiter on August 28,2006 at 8:39 PM
Those big box stores don't usually the latest in comptuer parts anyway. They'll have things that sell in bigger volume. Best Buy probably won't have this card on store shelves 'til it's several months old. I could be wrong but that's my experinse.
Posted by Alissa on August 28,2006 at 4:32 PM
I'm mad at big box stores!  They're the ones selling us what is supposed to be 'top-of-the-line" merchandise, that can do everything we could ever possibly dream.  It's only later, when the warranty's up and it breaks down that we find out we've been duped.  If we can't trust those smiling faces in contemporary casual uniforms, who can we trust?  Probably anyone but them...i imagine this is just another scenario where they saw me coming a mile away.  Next time i shop, i'm bringing a computer geek.