Official: ATI Radeon 9800XT Photo

[SimGuy]

Official: ATI Radeon 9800XT Photo

Straight from Computex Taipei & Monarch

It's a monster! Finally, the public gets to see what ATI has been working on for the last little while. Although not supporting any new technologies over the latest R360 chipset (ie Radeon 9800), the 9800 XT is simply an overclocked version of the 9800 Pro designed to give the absolute best performance on HL2 in preparation for the upcoming Christmas 2003 season.

It should be noted that all retail 9800XT cards will be shipping with a full retail copy of Half-Life 2, Valve's smash-hit sequel to the Game of the Year 1998.

Notice the interesting cooling system on this baby, which was expected as the 9800XT is rumoured to run in excess of 425 MHz core and 380 MHz DDR VRAM.

/me knows what he wants for Christmas...

Source: NeoWin (http://www.neowin.net/) & The Inquirer (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11728)

[primesuspect]

Wow! Painted HS! Sweet!

[SimGuy]

Damned cooler looks like it's ATI's version of the Flow FX. Hopefully, it's still nice and quiet.

[Cyclonite]

*Drool* What's the price of that sucker gonna be?

[Templar]

You're easily looking at $400+ Trekky, if not $450.

The HSF looks omgswett :D

[Cyclonite]

*Sigh* I was thiking about selling my R9700 Pro and picking up one of those bad boys when it's a available. *drool, again*

[Geeky1]

Tempting, but not tempting enough... I'll be waiting for the PCI express version. The 9700 Pro should be (barely) fast enough to hold me over until then :D

[SimGuy]

You won't see one.

AFAIK, ATI and NVidia will only be offering PCI Express versions of their latest graphical processors (NV40 & R420).

AGP isn't dead yet and won't be for another few years. Remember how long PCI graphics cards kicked around since the advent of AGP?

[stillwaters]

speaking of PCI express i doubt we are gonna see a big bost in performance right away.

i mean, they card manufacturers haven't even used AGP 8X to its maximum capablities...so its gonna be at least a couple of years till the cards outgrow 8x agp..let alone moving on to PCI express.

[Geeky1]

SimGuy, then I'll be waiting for the R420 I guess... I'm in no big hurry to upgrade- between the 2500+ dually/8500/640GB RAID system and the 2.5GHz 1800+/9700 Pro/160GB system, I've got enough power for right now... and if push comes to shove, I'll just pick up a set of P3s for the print server or something :D

I realize that PCI express won't be a big deal for a while, but when I upgrade, I like being on the cutting edge, and since my next system will probably be either a dual opteron or an athlon fx anyhow, I might as well get a PCI Express graphics card to go with it...

[MediaMan]

The 9800 PRO XT is a card that just isn't fast enough to warrant a 9900 rating but it looks as though ATI may be gathering the dark forces of benchmarks around itself in order to take another swing at NVIDIA again.