X1800XT available but OEMs only

IT'S BEEN a long since ATI promised that it will have world wide availability of Radeon X1800XT cards. ATI promised to have those cards on the November the 5th but today on the November the 22nd is still almost impossible to get them in most parts of the world.

Traditionally you can get some cards in the US and we found out that newegg has Connect 3D X1800XT cards in stock and as from today ATI branded cards are available as well. You can check on them here.

ATI and Newegg did push the suggested retail prices from $549 to $589 and $599 but they just want to earn some money out of these very hard to find cards. Not that we approve of it, but Nvidia did the same to its 7800 GTX 512 supporters. ATI's premium customer Dell has some cards listed for $599 not available today, but we heard that they should be in stock by the end of the week. Check them here

When it comes to the old continent we failed to find a single X1800XT cards in Europe. We learned that some of the cards have been shipped but most of them went to OEM's and System integrators. We heard that you can buy one of these cards in a system but not in retail or etail. We know that certain UK System integrators got some cards and sold then in PC's last week.

Now it seems very real that Overclockers date was right all along, they listed their cards for November 28th availability. It's not a good start as it seems ATI's Platinum edition repeating all over again but likely to be solved very soon. We are just tired of being told that the cards will be available next week.

Nvidia went quiet on this as it still has to ship its second batch of GTX 512 MB cards sometimes this week. In both cases we think that both companies will miss some of the Yule and Thanksgiving dates. µ