OC UK starts selling 1GB 2900XT for £279

OCUK, THE WELL-KNOWN UK e-tailer began accepting pre-orders for the 1GB HD2900XT card, with availability coming within 10 days time, as we said here and here.

There are several minor changes to the board, but first and foremost, the clock of the memory has risen from 826MHz DDR to a clear 1GHz mark, a nice 17% increase. The bandwidth rose to a record 128 GB/s, from 105.98 GB/s on a 512MB card. The PCB is give or take identical, with 16 el cheapo Hynix memory chips being replaced with 16 spankin' new Samsung GDDR-4 chips.

We're not sure about the overclockability of the memory chips, but the GPU is known to clock by 100MHz or more on stock air cooling, and a 200MHz overclock is easily do-able with water-cooling. We're currently experimenting with Italian waterblocks by Ybris, and our 512MB boards are happily working at 1GHz, a hefty 248 MHz up from default clock.

For those that do not find regular 512MB R600 attractive enough...

Given the headroom given by this 80nm GPU, we are surprised to hear that GPU clock remained the same on 1GB card. So, 79 quids more for 512MB memory more, and nice 22 GB/s increase in memory bandwidth, which should boast scores when advanced filtering is applied. µ

L'INQ
1GB card, 280 quids without rip-off
512MB card for 200 quids without rip-off (pardon, VAT)