In an attempt to offer customers in performance-mainstream market segment something more advanced than the RADEON 9800-series, graphics chip designer ATI Technologies is said to offer the RADEON X800 SE product to end-users, something that the Markham, Ontario-based company did not want to do initially.

ATI RADEON X800 SE is the third graphics product in ATI RADEON X800 lineup unveiled in early May. According to Dell, who so far has been the only supplier of such graphics cards, the product has a 425MHz graphics processor, 128MB of 800MHz DDR SDRAM memory with 256-bit bus width along with typical set of connectors, such as D-Sub, DVI-I and TV-Out. It is generally believed that the RADEON X800 SE graphics chip has 8 pixel pipelines and 6 vertex processors. By contrast, ATI RADEON X800 PRO and ATI RADEON X800 XT visual processing units sport 12 and 16 pixel pipelines respectively, delivering greater performance in the majority of cases.

An ATI spokesperson said earlier this year that the RADEON X800 SE was an OEM only product, but Chinese web-site HKEPC.com now reports that the graphics company aims to introduce AGP flavour of the X800 SE part to retail market. The product is said to be positioned for performance-mainstream market segment and cost from $200 to $300.

The RADEON X800 SE is likely to offer performance higher than that of the RADEON 9800 XT, but lower compared to the RADEON X800 PRO. In case the speed estimations are correct, when available in retail, the product might put quite some pressure on sales of NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 graphics offering at the same price-point. However, it is not clear whether the RADEON X800 SE will be available widely.

It remains unknown whether ATI plans to offer RADEON X800 SE versions for PCI Express computers via retail channels.

Officials for ATI Technologies did not comment on the report.