"ATI's R520 production exceed initial expectations"

After being delayed for weeks the ATI R520 GPU has made it to the production line and according to sources close to ATI the quality and performance of the R520 exceed initial expectations.

It's believed the R520 will be released within a few weeks with the core clocked at 700MHz.

Compared to 7800 GTX, our sources claim that the R520 can best Nvidia's performance and image quality levels in any scenario. Nvidia recently came under fire with accusations that the company uses "driver cheats" for its 7800 series to increase frame rate performance on one side but sacrifices image quality on the other. While we have to wait for the final product to verify its actual capability, ATI may have in fact a chip in its hands that could force Nvidia to release a new flagship for its 7800 series.

ATI's CrossFire is also coming up and it's expected CrossFire motherboards will retail for 5 to 10 percent less than SLI motherboards.