We disassembled the video card heatsink to take a look, see Figure 4. If you pay close attention you will see that the base of the heatsink – the part that touches the graphics chip – is made of copper. The heatsink fins are also made of copper. The fan blows the hot air to outside the computer case, helping a lot to decrease the PC internal temperature. But, because of this blower, besides the x16 PCI Express slot this video card uses the slot right next to it (usually a x1 PCI Express slot).

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Figure 4: Heatsink from the Radeon X1900 XTX reference board.

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Figure 5: Video card with its heatsink detached.

This video card uses eight GDDR3 512-Mbit 1.1 ns chips from Samsung (K4J52324QC-BJ11)to give it 512 MB of video memory (512 Mbits x 8 = 512 MB). These chips can run up to 1.8 GHz. Since this video card accesses the memory at 1.55 GHz, there is 16% headroom for overclocking the memory keeping it inside its specs. Of course you can try overclock it over its specs.

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Figure 6: 1.1 ns GDDR3 memory chip used by ATI Radeon X1900 XTX reference board.

The reference board has video capture function (VIVO), using ATI Rage Theater chip.

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Figure 7: ATI Rage Theater chip for video capture.