ATI Radeon X1800 XT Breaks 1 GHz Speed Barrier

An independent team of Finnish over-clockers has made world history by over-clocking a graphics processor to engine clock levels above 1 GHz. The record was set on the recently-announced Radeon® X1800 XT graphics processor from ATI Technologies Inc.

Noted Finnish over-clockers Sampsa Kurri and Ville Suvanto achieved graphics engine clocks of 1.003 GHz and a memory speed of 1.881 GHz (940.50 MHz DDR (dual data-rate) memory clocks) with maximum system stability and no visual artifacts.

The team, optimistic that higher speeds could ultimately be achieved with the Radeon X1800 XT, attained the record speeds using a custom-built liquid nitrogen cooling system that cooled the graphics processor to minus-80 degrees Celsius. "We’re just warming up," joked Kurri. "But we believe that the Radeon X1800 XT has even more over-clocking headroom, and in the coming weeks we expect to achieve higher clock speeds and even greater performance levels."

"It’s impressive to see the Radeon X1800 XT architecture achieve 1 GHz core speed and approach 2 GHz memory speed, which far exceeds the specifications of the memory devices," said Stan Ossias, Sr. Product Manager, Desktop Products, ATI Technologies Inc. "Once faster GDDR-4 memory arrives next year, users can expect to see the hidden potential of ATI’s innovative new memory controller design complement our powerful shader engines with massive additional memory clock scalability."

A screen shot can be found at:
http://www.muropaketti.com/r520_ghz.png.

Radeon X1800 XT’s extreme clock-scaling capabilities are made possible by a series of key innovations that include use of the state-of-the-art 90-nanometer semiconductor process technology, an efficient new Ultra-threaded Shader Model 3.0 architecture, and a revolutionary new 512-bit ring-bus memory controller.