ATI Radeon X1950 Announced (Photo of reference cooler inside)
 

Radeon X1950 at launch will come in two flavors: a high clock "XTX" version, and a CrossFire version. Both cards feature 512MB GDDR4, and the only major difference between the two is that the CrossFire X1950 houses the composite engine and input interfaces for CrossFire. Just yesterday, ATI issued an advisory to its partners claiming "Clock frequencies for RADEON X1950 family products are pending and will be provided at a later date." However, in March of this year ATI released a new policy for AIB partners to overclock X1000 series cores with some discretion. While we can already confirm some partners are planning 650MHz core versions, there is still a distinct possibility that higher clocked cards are also in the works. Memory clock frequencies have not been announced either, though Samsung announced its GDDR4 is already capable of 3.2GHz in 8x512Mbit configurations.

Nice Cooler:klap:

Looks good, and sounds good too? Hmm... I spy lots of copper in that one, bet it is literally a heavyweight!

I saw heatpipes and a copper base.

I can only applaud silent reference cooling solutions, and this one surely looks promosing, let's hope the new X1950XTX doesn't up heat output so the fan ends up spinning at high speed all the time.

I must admit though that this weekend with a room temp of 30+°C I could play Oblivion with an X1900XTX with reference cooler without finding it "extremely" loud, but it was intrusive enough and those people who like silence will surely appreciate this step forward from ATI.

Sort of on-topic... but do the GDDR4 chips even need cooling anymore, since they use so much less power than GDDR3?

airflow: yes.

heatsinks + airflow: no.

:-)

www.hkepc.com posted a picture of the X1950 .. In black?