ATi Presents Its PCI Express Product Line

Introduction

ATi goes PCI Express. At Computex ATi announced their new PCI Express models Radeon X600 for mainstream and X300 for entry level segment. The Enthusiast segment is covered by the PCI Express model of the Radeon X800.

The low profile version of the X300 SE.

The X300 is a DirectX 9 card featuring 4 parallel pixel pipelines and two vertex shader units. It's ATis first chip to be manufactured in 110 nanometers. The X300 will feature a 128-bit memory interface and supports up to 256 MB frame buffer memory. The core is clocked with moderate 325 MHz, the memory with 400 MHz (DDR) allowing a memory bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s. The slower X300 SE has a 64-bit memory interface with 64 or 128 MB memory running at the same clock rates resulting in half the memory bandwidth of 3.2 GB/s. On paper, X300 supports all the features we know from the R9600 series but there's certainly a lot optimizations missing to reduce costs.

The X300 SE in standard form factor.

In mainstream ATi presents the new X600 series. The ringleader here is the X600 XT, running at 500/740 MHz with a memory bandwidth of 11.8 GB/s. The X600 Pro is running at 400/600 MHz (9.6 GB/s) but is identical featurewise. The X600 is based on the well known Radeon 9600 alias RV360. It offers 4 pixel pipelines and two vertex shaders and a 128-bit memory interface.

The Radeon X600 Pro by ATI.

Radeon X600 XT model by GeCube.

Heatsink on the backside of the card.