The Guru of 3D takes a look at ATI's new Radeon X1000 series of Graphics cards

October 5th, the day has finally arrived. Yes indeed, ATI today proudly launched its newborn kids and I did say kids not kid as it is not just one product release this time. Gosh golly darn it; it surely took them a while because hey most of us really did expect the new R520 series in May or June. What was the delay you ask? Yeah you guessed right, it was a bug in the chip design. It effected both the R520 (X1800)and R530 (X1600). I'll get geeky immediately, basically it boiled down to a pin sending out a logic 1 where it should have been sending a 0. If the frequency of the core went up with a rating over 500 MHz the transmission gate of the graphics core would load itself up with incorrect numbers and thus corrupted data. One of the needle in a haystack things I guess. It took ATI a while to find what was the design flaw in the new chip, yet once they actually did find the issue, it took less then 24 hours to fix it, after which the ball started rolling. It's good they found it since as soon as the results came back they instantly could clock the fastest product 100/150 MHz faster, not too shabby eh? Ladies and gentlemen, today we see the rise and shine of ATI's latest.

ATI's new Radeon X1000 series of Graphics cards