Oy! Even worse! I had a couple of meetings with board-partners like TUL (PowerColor) and HiS Technology. These were supposed to be NDA (disclosed) meetings with a presentation of new R600 based product.

AMD decided to pull the plug on these presentations as they really do not have anything to show. The way it is right now is that the press-briefings have been delayed towards likely the end of April. I still believe we'll see four models of the R600 based chipset. I think one of the biggest issues right now is the low yield levels due to data leakage (successful working products). It was rumored at the CeBIT that at the initial launch only 30,000 products will be available "World-wide"! That's both retail and OEM (which takes easily half of the products).

I so hope that AMD-ATI can get past the problems as we need that high-level of competition in the desktop graphics cards market. This is good for everyone, including NVIDIA.

NDA or not, I quickly had a chance to observe two R600 based PC's at a selection of manufacturers who where kind enough to demo them despite AMD being against it.

The rumors are true, the card photos you have seen are correct and so is power consumption. I can't get you any numbers on performance as it was not available. The new Ruby demo is looking very good for sure though. But for now I honestly do not have anything new to add other than the rumors on the web are pretty much on par.

Right let's move into the actual pictorial. Loads to show, lots to see !

Power Color

The first brief stop for this pictorial is PowerColor. We have been testing some of their Products. I briefly met with Raymen and spoke about R600 and some generic stuff.  There's nothing much to show you photo wise other than thei AC cooled products.

They work really well (read our review). Below you can see the X1950 XT with new AC cooler.

The new AC cooled products sell quite well.

Also AC cooled this X1950 Pro card passively, which is the new trend in the industry. Great stuff.

PowerColor X1950 PRO SCS3 specs:

• 575 MHz core clock
• 690 MHz (1380 MHz) RAM (GDDR3) clock
• 256MB of 256-bit RAM
• 2 x Dual DVI (with HDCP support), VIVO/HDTV
• PCI Express x16
• P/N: 4712505020952