ATI X1800XT Pre-Production Sample and Review Sample Photos

[Apoptosis]

Rich Heye, VP and GM of ATI's desktop business talked with some media publications about the problems with R520 core. He stated that the reason the R520 didn't launch in was because the R520 had a design flaw that was over looked in the core. Once identified flaw was easily fixed and the flagship ATI X1800XT (R520) gained more than 150MHz in clock frequency, which is big deal. If that 150MHz wasn't gained the X1800XT would not have been able to compete with the nVidia 7800GTX in performance benchmarks.

I was able to see one of the ATI Radeon X1800XT's that was produced back in Q1 2005 and here is an image of it.

The Original X1800XT Sample Card w/ Flawed Core:



The Current X1800XT Card w/ New Core and PCB:



As you can tell the layout of the PCB is different and stuff has been moved around and not just removed. ATI has officially stated that they just fixed the problem with the core, but after looking and old and new pictures it is clear that more than just a core change was made. In the end it doesn't really matter because the problem was fixed, the X1800XT should be on the market soon now that it has been pre-viewed!

Just something interesting that I saw that most of you wouldn't get a chance to hear about on another site or by yourself.

[sbohdan]

any links?

[rhino56]

so any news on this card yet? wasnt this what the countdown on atis site was about?
where is this card?

[-mogwai]

i heard that this news came out about just three days ago (very recent stuff), but i haven't had a chance to look into it or check out any articles. i remember when i first saw the benchmarks for the r520 from a link in the forums (to hardware analysis' benchmark) and thought "wow... this is what we've been waiting for? what a waste of time and publicity for ati..." i'm glad that they've figured out the kinks that were holding it back.

nice post.