R480 and R430: ATI's Fall PCIe Update

ATI Radeon X850 & X800 XL

If you are one of the many people who has wanted to buy the new ATI Radeon X800 XT or NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra over the last few months, you know what it means to have a great deal of patience - and a bundle of cash. The new cards hit the stores in very small numbers and, even when available, were overpriced. The smaller X800 Pro and 6800 GT models were slightly better positioned in the market. The delivery situation for AGP models has improved slightly, but we still can't say that the product range is widely available. And many PCI Express models from NVIDIA and ATI are still not in the stores at all.

This annoys not only consumers but also the board partners of both manufacturers, who could sell many more cards if they had the supplies of graphics chips to put on them. ATI is now tackling this problem head-on. Together with the long-planned introduction of the R480 chip range (aka Radeon X850) ATI has now launched two new X800 models with the R430 chip core. Thanks to the improved manufacturing techniques used to make these new Radeon cores, bottlenecks should be a thing of the past.