ATI Radeon X1800 first look

The Chinese guys from HKEPC got their hands on a R520 Rev 02 engineering sample and posted some pictures on their website.

According to the card maker, the Rev 05 engineering sample may differ slightly from the final PCB when launched. The cooler solution on the card is yet to be determined and the original intention is the use the Dual Slot cooling solution. Since the R520 core is manufactured on 90nm micron process with power optimizations therefore the final sample may employ single slot cooling solution. This time round, we did not receive the cooler from the card maker therefore we use our own cooling solution. At first, we thought that the R520 mounting holes will be similar to X850XT but it seems otherwise. In fact, it is similar to the GeForce 6800 Ultra so we employ a nVidia cooler to R520

The second revision of the ATI X1800 (R520) engineering sample is 229mm long and was designed with 32 pipelines in mind. But ATI had lots of yield problems so the final version will probably only feature 16 pipelines although versions with 24 and 32 pipelines may also appear in limited quantity.

Check it out over at HKEPC