X1800 GTO is 500/1000 MHz

ATI has a card to fight Nvidia's up and coming G73 based Geforce 7600 card. The card will be clocked at the same speeds as X1800 XL cards. The only difference will be the pipeline count. Radeon X1800 GTO will have twelve pipelines and core clocked at 500MHz and memory clocked to 1000MHz.

The card will cost as much as Nvidia charges for the 6800 GS now. Its suggested retail price is set to $249 and we believe that Nvidia's Geforce 7600 should be priced about the same. We don't know which of the two will be faster. We expect to see these cards at CeBIT and they will ship in the second half of March.

I hope that someone like Sapphire will find a way to unlock the additional pipes to repeat its previous GTO success. It's all a matter of the BIOS, we reckon. µ