14 DAY TRIAL // The announced 14th of May official release date of the Radeon 2900XT restored hope to those hardcore ATI fans, but up until now nothing has been heard of an actual implementation of the R600 GPU beyond reference boards. Time to see what HIS has in store for us.
While waiting to see what Sapphire is planning for their new R600 line-up, we find out that the first to spring up with information regarding their new video cards is HIS. In a brief attempt to update the company website with details of an unreleased product, HIS representatives realized that this might be a little too soon for the potential customers and pulled the data back down. The chimeric product was none other than the embodiment of a Radeon HD 2900 XT card. However, the specifications for this card were pretty much known to ATI's fans, as these were previously leaked, matching what ATI claimed to include in their reference boards. It seems that this "incident" was intended to officially confirm what the fans had hoped or already knew.
The specs that appeared with the ATI's reference boards can be found here as well: 512MB of DDR3, 512-bit memory interface, 320 shader units and the impressive 128-bit HDR rendering support. HIS provided information in order to confirm the existence of the 24X Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing modes, which were only rumored to be implemented in ATI's new video cards. More interesting seems to be the fact that the photo of the actual card did not depict any HDMI output. Instead, HIS mentioned something about a DVI to HDMI converter included in the package.
Moreover, the cooler attached to the video card looks to be exactly the same one used with the reference boards, which is somewhat disappointing since HIS is well-known for their innovative cooling systems provided in association with Arctic Cooling. Maybe they did not have enough time to come up with a funkier solution as AMD/ATI teased us with release dates and postponements.