OMG ! Do you have a clue how big the exhibition is ? Well .. it's big. I mean they have an internal public transportation service at the exhibit. My Appointment was at 1 PM, so Hilbert seeks and seeks for like half an hour .. yet no ATI on HAL 1. I'm asking an information clerc where they are .. Hall 6 mr. Hagedoorn. I say something like 'What ?'

Was I that insane writing down the right location or at the least preoccupied. So .. 1 PM running to Hall six ..  Hey.. there it is ATI. I'm asking for my contact Friederike and what do they say ? No sir, it's hall 1, on top of the building, on the roof ...

Hall 6

Yes dear people they have little conference rooms on top of a building, on the roof. So back in Formula 1 mode I ran back to Hall one and took the elevator to the roof. Indeed, I found an ATI booth. So there I was all sweaty from running, walking into the booth. I ask the receptionists for my contact while at the right side some girl was crying and actually my contact was comforting that girl.

After a few minutes You can imagine what my first logical question was ... why on top of the roof ? Where it's rather hard to find people. Well as you know ATI really doesn't sell products themselves anymore here in Europe. They make use of the powered by ATI resellers and co branders. Basically they do not want to intrude the companies like Hercules, Power Color and pretty much any other manufacturer that sells ATI products in Europe. Okay that makes sense, low profile.

I was a little time limited so we briefly went through the new product lineup, talked about the new mobile products and of course the all new Radeon series. A very interesting conversation, unfortunately nothing new in terms of information that you guys don't know. One of the important things that is keeping a lot of you busy lately was this. Take the Radeon 9700 Pro and the 9800 Pro, codename R300 and R350.

There's a lot of discussion whether it's the same core as the Radeon 9800 pro seems to be a beefed up 9700 Pro. ATI assured me of the fact that it really is a different core. We've seen driver hacks on the internet that magically turn your 9700 pro into a 9800 Pro. So that is a bunch of BS as from a hardware point of view it's simply not possible.

ATI will be sending out the reference 9800 Pro late this week towards Guru3D.com so we can bring you an objective test in a later stage. After a nice and informative chat we went to a computer room where all new cards could be tested. I've played a bit with the R9800 Pro and Unreal 2003, which of course ran by all means smooth as butter on a 3GHz Pentium 4 gaming rig. We of course discussed 3D Mark 03 also. But I've decided to let that discussion go. The normal consumer will accept it as a valid benchmark and stare themselves blind at the end result, so it's now a common accepted benchmark. This is the last of it you heard me discussing it.

Time ran out I had my next meeting planned in 15 minutes in Hal 23 ... NVIDIA. More ATI product screenshots will follow on other pages in this article. Like the Gigabyte products.

The guy in the middle is my evil twin brother Gilbert.