ATI's X1000 bound for AGP market

ALTHOUGH BOTH Nvidia and ATI are reluctant to openly speak about sales of graphics cards that fit into an AGP slot - the sad fact is that both companies don't publicly care about massive majority of their GPU sales. The reason why is a very simple one: they don't want to spend time and money on developing their high-end products for the AGP slot, so their spinner machine has to throttle on "idle" or "defensive" when it comes to the user-beloved, almost nine-year old slot.

After Diamond MultiMedia sucked badly after paper-launching X1800AGP product and then sending a copy&paste e-mail instead of a press release with their error, many gamers came to us and asked will there ever be a new AGP board with new tech. Things are about to change - one of largest ATi partners is finally coming out with products of X1000 range in AGP flavour, just in time for Yule sale madness.

Both X1300 and X1600 use very similar PCB, so GeCube slapped two GPU's on the very same AGP PCB and shipped them out. The simple named GC-RX1600PGA2-D3 is actually an RV530 based product, clocked at 500MHz for GPU core, while GC-RX1300GA2-D3 is an RV515LE based product, with the core running at 450MHz. Both boards come with 256MB of same DDR-II memory, but with different clocks on each board.

The X1600 product features two DVI outputs, while X1300 comes in more of a classical D-Sub+DVI combo. Also, X1600 core is being cooled by a fan and a copper heatsink, X1300 is cooled by a smaller fan&aluminium heatsink combo. Since these 90nano chips suck more power than measily 35W that AGP slot can provide, we have seen "Return of The Molex" in not so hip-hop version.

We didn't manage to find out how GeCube actually did connect these "PCIe only" chips to an AGP slot, but we'd figure the backside of the PCB should feature the RIALTo bridge chip. Prices are expected to be just a tad higher than the PCIe counterparts, but there is no doubt there is plenty of room on the market.

Did we mention that the products support AVIVO and dominATIon marchitectures? µ

L'INQ
Spinola Taiwanese