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Sapphire launches Radeon X1950 GT

Published on 30th January 2007 by Tim Smalley

Radeon X1950 GT aims to be a more serious competitor to GeForce 7900 GS on the pricing front.

Sapphire Technology has today announced it's latest addition to the Radeon X1950 family of graphics cards.

Earlier this month, we revealed that AMD was planning to launch Radeon X1950 GT very soon, but there were no details on when we could expect the announcement to happen.

As we reported earlier, the specifications of the card are similar to the Radeon X1950 Pro, as the two use the same 80 nanometre RV570 graphics processing unit.

It comes with 36 pixel shader processors, 12 ROPs, 8 vertex shaders, a 256-bit memory interface and support for native CrossFire. Clock speeds are reduced from 575/1380MHz (on the X1950 Pro) to 500MHz for the core and 1200MHz on the memory.

VIVO support is dropped and replaced with a standard TV-Out connector, but the card retains support for HDCP over the two dual-link DVI ports. In addition, Sapphire's card will only come with 256MB of GDDR3 memory and there will be no AGP version of the card released.

Pricing is expected to be competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce 7900 GS, which sells for as little as £110 including VAT, while the Radeon X1950 Pro sells for around the £130 mark. Seeing as the Radeon X1950 Pro comprehensively beats the GeForce 7900 GS, it makes sense for ATI to release a slightly slower-performing card that competes on price. However, that doesn't help to alleviate the alphabet soup that is the graphics market at the moment.

We'll leave you with a shot of the card - you can talk about it in the usual place.

7 Comments

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teamtd11 30th January 2007, 13:19

this might be perfect to replace my brothers dead x800gto, was going to get a x1950pro, but on a 17" monitor. it might be better so save a few quid. and try and clock it to x1950pro speeds :D

trig 30th January 2007, 14:47

personally, i dont think there are near enough cards out right now...we need a card at every $5 price point...starting at say $75 and going all the way up to the gtx...so, get busy all you lazy vendors...w00t

Tyinsar 30th January 2007, 15:35

Even though wholly agree that something needs to be done with that nasty, conflicting, alphabet soup this card looks like it might be a good deal. I'm curious about the sound level of that cooler.

Tim S 30th January 2007, 15:44

It should be similar to the Radeon X1950 Pro - it looks very similar to me. :)

atanum141 30th January 2007, 19:25

would this be worth it in Crossfire versus a single 7800GTX? @ 1600x1200+ Rez's?

DXR_13KE 30th January 2007, 20:51

for the sake of God please stop making DX9 graphic cards and concentrate on making DX10 graphic cards.

Nova 31st January 2007, 04:22

im just happy that its single slot and will fit in my shuttle :-D