The cards look identical from almost every angle; the top of the cards shows us the mammoth cooler which is the same as the X1800XT. While it is a very good cooler at full spin it is quite loud, which is a bit of a deterrent. Hopefully it isn’t long before we see one of the famous IceQ versions of the X1900 series from HIS.
Moving to the right side of the card we have our normal PCI Express power connector. While this isn’t out of the ordinary, every time we went to run a benchmark and found the system instantly shutting down, we became a bit worried.
The same PSU that could power two GeForce 7800GTX cards in SLI was unable to power X1900 CrossFire. A few phone calls and we found ourselves with a Zippy 700 watt power supply which has a massive 45 amp 12V rail. Anyone wanting to go CrossFire is really going to have to look into their power supply situation as a higher single amp rail is going to be more useful then multiple smaller amp rails. Every time we hit benchmark and the cards switched into 3D mode, the power supply would trip due to overloading.
Turning the card over there isn’t much else apart from the bracket that holds the heatsink to the card. While there is a huge amount of memory on each card (512MB), the current design has seen both nVidia and ATI be able to squeeze it all to the front of the card giving us a very boring back. The benefit of this though is that all the memory is being cooled by the large and effective cooler on the front.
Installing the cable while a bit fidgety (thanks to the four screws) means that it is very secure and sturdy. The connector feels a lot better overall when compared to the previous CrossFire connector.
