ATI Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition

The ATI Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition was a high-end graphics card released by ATI Technologies in November 2006 as an optional GPU upgrade for the Power Mac G5. It is based on a chipset developed by ATI (which was in the process of being acquired by AMD).

Description
The Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition is based on ATI's ATI R580 XL performance graphics chip that was fabricated by TSMC on the 90 nm process. The GPU clock speed was 575 MHz, which could be boosted to 600 MHz. It contained 256 MB of GDDR3 video RAM. The card features two dual-link DVI ports. It took up the space of a double-wide PCIe 1.0 x16 slot, and required an auxiliary power cable.

Support
The Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition required a minimum of Mac OS X 10.4.7 (Tiger). A separate version was also made available for the 1st-generation Mac Pro.

Issues
Due to a printing error, early units were mistakenly identified as being Windows Vista ready.

Articles

 * REVIEW: ATI Radeon X1900 GT For G5 Power Macs with PCIe slots by Rob-ART Morgan at Bare Feats (2006-11-11)