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 a port and two dual-link DVI ports capable of driving up to two digital displays at 2560 x 1600 pixels, such as the 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display. With DVI to VGA Adapters, up to two analog (VGA) displays could be supported at up to 2048 x 1536 pixels. It took up the space of a PCIe 1.0 x16 slot, and required an auxiliary power cable.

The character printed on the GPU enclosure is named "Ruby", produced by RhinoFX to demonstrate and promote ATI's graphics capabilities.

Support
The Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition required a minimum of Mac OS X 10.4.7 (Tiger). Support is assumed to have ended with Mac OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard), the last version from Apple to support PowerPC-based systems. A separate version was also made available for the 1st-generation Mac Pro. It is possible to flash the firmware of a Radeon X1900 GT for PCs to work on a Power Mac G5, but the cooling fan on it would default to spinning at maximum speed.

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)