ATI RADEON X700 AGP cards to go on sale soon

Following the official release of RADEON X800 XL and RADEON X850 XT AGP 8x graphics cards Chinese ZOL published information about similar, but lower-end products — RADEON X700 AGP.

Unlike its PCI-E analog, such a novelty has additional 4-pin power connector. This seems strange first, because 110nm RV410 GPU doesn´t consume much. Besides, RIALTO bridge that, unlike NVIDIA HSI, is located on the back side doesn´t require additional cooling, which indirectly points at its low energy consumption:

But the matter is that PCI Express x16 can offer additional 75W of power required for normal card operation. AGP, in its turn, can´t do this.

Cards feature large (and presumably silent) coolers with heatsinks that cover memory chips as well and maybe cool them as well:

4 x GDDR3 256 Mbit chips from Infineon support 2ns fetch time and make the total of 128MB. Besides, the design leaves space for another 128MB. But the bus still stays 128-bit wide.

The new cards feature D-Sub, DVI-I and S-Video connectors. The RV410 GPU they are based on provides rather humble features: 8 pixel and 6 vertex pipelines, 475MHz core clock.

Speaking of market position, these AGP novelties will the lower price ranges replacing old RADEON 9800 products.

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