AMD R600 Revealed?

[Navin]

David Berlind of ZDNET, has published some images he obtained during an AMD press conference and which apparently depict a prototype graphics card powered by the upcoming R600 GPU.

Get the lowdown by reading this HEXUS.headline.

[chuckskull]

I dont think the retail card will be that big, thats an OEM one using the elongated fitting sytem to add a fan on the end. If you actually look at the PCB it looks about 8800GTS sized to me.

[Sprite]

Yeah you can remove the fan on the back. Looks like a nice card, might upgrade to it when it's been out for a few weeks and the prices have dropped.

[Clunk]

Yep, looks like an X1900XT with a big plastic cowelling on.

[merlin2001]

still think this is really a case of too little, to late - even if R600 destroys the 8800 in every b/mark and test, nvidia have not been standing still and I am sure they will be able to push more product into the market to counter AMD/ATI. I wonder if the merger had any adverse impact on the dev. cycle of the R600? pretty normal for their to be intergration issues in mergers after all....

[dangel]

I'm still waiting to see what happens - i've no pressing need to upgrade my video card yet and so there's no harm in waiting and seeing where the market goes. Worst case is the R600 makes the 8800 cheaper isn't it? The again if the R600 is faster and the drivers are better.. Who knows.

[kalniel]

Worst case is the R600 makes the 8800 cheaper isn't it?

Only if the R600 has a clear performance advantage. Nvidia have their midrange G8x cards for the lower price market. I don't think they'll drop much in price until the 8900 comes out.

[dangel]

Only if the R600 has a clear performance advantage. Nvidia have their midrange G8x cards for the lower price market. I don't think they'll drop much in price until the 8900 comes out.

Won't the 8900 launch around R600 time anyway? I'm hearing that's the card the R600 will compete with - people are expecting it to be faster than the 8800.

[kalniel]

Probably, NVidia seem to be doing the sensible thing and keeping at well understood manufacturing processes rather than jumping to new ones for the sake of it.

But in that case I expect the 8800 to run out of stock rather than co-exist. The price will drop only so much as retailers excercise stock clearance, so it'll depend more on how bad their stock control is.