Almost 3 months ago NVIDIA launched GeForce 7950 GX2 but ATI managed to be the first to introduce a graphic card with 1GHz GDDR4.

NVIDIA gave ATI a blow with its GeForce 7950 GX2 combining two GeForce 7900 GT into one single-slot SLI solution. It costs a lot of money but it’s fast. It holds the number one position and it allows you to benefit from SLI even if it uses only a PCI-E slot.

Instead of going after NVIDIA and create a CrossFire card, ATI improved its flagship Radeon X1900 XTX and turned it into Radeon X1950XTX which is the first card featuring GDDR4. On top on this, ATi features a new cooling system that allows the card to reach a memory clock of 1GHz (2GHz effective) which is a record for video cards.

Based on the R580+ core, X1950 XTX benefits from the GDDR4 (580 core didn’t supported GDDR4 only GDDR3) and it’s 1.0GHz (2.0GHz effective) allowing the card to reach an impressive 64GB per second of bandwidth. With 25% more than any other single graphic card.

ATI has taken the opportunity with this new card to address one of the biggest complaints about the Radeon X1900 and its ilk—the noisy fan. The big copper heat sink itself is larger and the fan itself is both larger and wider. It was also moved back to the tail end of the card, pushing it a few inches further away from the back of your case where sound escapes.

This way ATI said that the new cooling assembly can move more air and cool the chips better without spinning the fan quite as fast. Also, the fan emits a lower pitch which translates into a “not so loud” sound even when the fan is at full speed.

Considering all this I think that the card will be well looked by the game maniacs. For a price of $450 it can be yours.

Until then, here is a picture with X1950 XTX: