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ATI FireGL V7350 Graphics Card Review: Radeon X1800 XT for Professionals? (page 3)

Category: Video

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 03/20/2006 | 03:02 AM ]

PCB Design

Now let’s take a closer look at our today’s main hero – the top-of-the-line ATI FireGL V7350 professional graphics card with 1GB of onboard memory. I have already said a few times today that this graphics card has a lot in common with the ATI Radeon X1800 XT. This is also true for the exterior appearance and design of the card:

The front side of the FireGL V7350 card differs from the corresponding gaming solution only by the decorative picture on the cooling system.

The reverse side of the PCB is very much different, this is where your eye catches all the major distinguishing features at once: ATI FireGL V7350 has additional memory chips here that are absent by the gaming cards with only 512MB of memory.

Of course, I would like to say a few words about the cooling system of the ATI FireGL V7350. It requires an additional slot and is built with a 60mm turbine that throws warm air outside the case right away. Note that this cooling system serves to cool down the GPU and the memory chips on the front side of the PCB. As for the memory chips on the reverse side of the PCB, they do not use any cooling at all.

The similarity between ATI FireGL V7350 and ATI Radeon X1800 XT is also proven by the component base used for these cards. Both of them are equipped with the same GDDR3 memory chips – Samsung K4J52324QC-BJ12. And even though the graphics processor is marked as FireGL, the way it looks suggests very clearly that it is a close relative of the ATI R520 GPU.

As for the working frequencies of the ATI FireGL V7350, they do not correspond to those of the Radeon X1800 XT. The professional card works at lower clock speeds: 600MHz on the chip and 1300MHz on the memory. Here I would like to stress that professional graphics cards do not have the dynamic frequency change mechanism when they switch from 2D to 3D mode. Therefore, the numbers listed above are true for any work mode of the ATI FireGL V7350 graphics card. So, the performance of ATI FireGL V7350 in gaming applications will be slightly lower than that of Radeon X1800 XT (its working frequencies are 625MHz for the chip and 1500MHz for the memory), because the increase in the amount of onboard memory will in no case ensure any performance growth in this type of applications.