Radeon 9700 external power plug confirmed

YOU CAN SEE authentic pictures of the Radeon 9700 on Chinese sites like this one, and we also know that the R300 will need an extra power plug so that it can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

We assumed that All in Wonder cards will definitely need external power because of its TV tuner and as it's an extremely complicated chip with 107 million transistors but we learned differently.

It was easy to assume that even Radeon 9700 would need external power to be able to work simply as this chip will have about 50 million transistors more than TI 4600 chip, and is still the fastest chip on market.

Some of our sources a blink away from ATI said that the external power plug will be similar to the power plug that is used on floppy drives.

They said that the card needs external power because of limitations of AGP power standards with 107 million chips way too much for AGP 2.0 standard.

For those that can remember Voodoo 5500 cards, that also used this external power and worked just fine.

Radeon 9700 will be the fastest card on market for a few months at least until NV30 arrived later this year. But as we said R300 will move to a 130 nanometer process and will be called Radeon 10 000 and obviously have a higher clock speed than the 150 nanometer Radeon 9700 which is due to launch any day now or two.

Still, can ATI manage to ship cards in early September as initially planned? µ