ATI's R430 to fight 6600GT and 6800 STD

IT IS TIME to reveal some of the details of the R430 chip. ATI will anounce this chip in early December, together with R480 and its variations.

R430 is a 110 nanometre version of the R420 core, or the R423 to be precise. It's a PCI Express only card but we know that ATI might be able to bridge those cards down to AGP sometime in Q1 2005. If it finds it necessary.

It will introduce three version os the cards XL, PRO and SE. XL comes with sixteen pipelines, the Pro will have twelve, while the SE will end up with eight pipes. We hope that we haven't mistyped XL from XT.

The clocks haven't been discused yet, but they will sit in 350MHz to 400MHz range for the clock speeds.

R430 will compete against the NV41, Geforce 6800 Standard, 6800 LE and of course let's not forget about the very strong and good 6600GT.

Those cards should be in the shops in the middle to the end of December, maybe too late for Yule shopping craziness, but still in time to give Nvidia a hard time.

Let's see how it will perform but ATI doesn't have too many naming slots open as X800, X700, X600 are already taken. They might have to go for the not so recognisable 50s in the name. µ