Stripped down of the cooling system

Jun 6, 2008 08:14 GMT  ·  By

AMD's yet-to-be-unveiled RV770-based graphics cards have been spotted at this year's Computex show in Taipei. Apparently, a number of journalists were lucky enough to take pictures of the new card lineup, but that was as far as they got - sadly, no game testing or benchmarking came with them. One of these cards, namely the HD 4850, was displayed stripped down of its cooling solution and left so anyone could take a good look at it.

Details about AMD's upcoming product lineup have been surfacing the web for quite some time now. At this moment, the cards are expected to be built on the 55nm manufacturing technology and to be the first to ship with Qimonda's GDDR5 memory (the 4870 model). Other technical details that have caused major waves of speculation include the cards' graphics performance or, to be more exact, whether they are going to come with support for Microsoft's DirectX 10.1 API, a feature that NVIDIA cards is yet to receive. Also, there have also been rumors surrounding the date for market availability of the cards, but the strongest voices indicate it might be around June 23.

Pictures of what appears to be an RV770-based AMD graphic card that was spotted at this year's Computex have recently been made available on the web. From what we can see in them, the card looks pretty standard, similar to the company's current HD 3000 series. However, the model pictured here will come with two DVI connectors and obviously no GDD5 memory.

The new AMD graphics lineup has been highly talked about this past month, as we are approaching the speculated official release date. Moreover, the cards need to prove that AMD can still provide gaming enthusiasts with all the necessary graphics performance, as NVIDIA's new GTX 280 and GTX 260 are also due to arrive in the upcoming timeframe.

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

The Radeon RV770 chip
The Qimond memory chips on the Radeon graphics card
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