ATI Radeon X1800 GTO Video Card Review

The Heat Sink Removed

Only with the heat sink removed does one start admire the work that went into making a good single slot cooling solution. This heat sink could be shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art without a doubt!

Since we still can’t see the memory IC’s the entire heat sink bracket must be removed. Once removed we can take clear pictures of the R520 core, memory IC’s and theater chipsets.

As you can see from the above image the ATI Radeon X1800 GTO uses the same R520 core found on the other X1800 Series cards. This R520 core was made on the 40th week of 2005.

Taking a closer look at the memory IC’s on our reference X1800GTO we find Samsung GDDR3 memory chips rated at 500MHz by ATI. Since the last two numbers are BC20 we can easily look up on the Samsung site and see that these chips are rated at 2.0ns (500MHz).