RD600 Preview

[Ubermann]

Last week from a top secret hidden bunker located miles under ground here in Taipei, Taiwan, we were given full and uninterrupted access to a motherboard based on ATI’s upcoming RD600 + SB600 platform for Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors.

During our time spent with the motherboards and friendly chaps who know quite a bit on how this kind of gear works, we were able to learn a lot about RD600, quizzing them with as many questions as we could think of at the time.


Check it out at Tweaktown (http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/931/)

[vapb400]

Along with obvious support for CrossFire dual graphics (two X8 slots), ATI has designed the RD600 to be very future proof. Most RD600 based motherboards should come out with three x16 PCI Express graphics (PEG) slots. The first two are obviously for CrossFire but the third (physical X16 slot but operating at only X2) is for physics processing –

?? not what I was expecting
Then what is this RD500 nonsense we keep hearing about?

[onewingedangel]

I'm sure rd600 will have dual x16 pcie, as this is to be Ati's high end board, and theres no way they'd go from 2x16 on the r580 back to 2x8.

[BlackX]

http://images.tweaktown.com/imagebank/atird600tw06_front.jpg

:ROTF:

performance is pretty disappointing :(

[Miwo]

hmm i thought the chipset was going to have fully independent memory speeds, aka no dividers?

420MHz on a reference board is not bad at all. A few months ago it was only 375MHz on an earlier one with 4 layers

[nn_step]

Intel has always been able to offer the best overclocking support for their processors with the 975X and previous chips but it would seem Intel is in for a shock – along with the rest of us.
So what they are basically saying is that ATi is kicking the current Intel chipset bottom in overclocking :D so basically you guys who want real overclocks don't bother buying a 975 chipset