The most mysterious novelty from ATI, RADEON LE, has quietly appeared in Japanese shops. Although ATI didn’t announce anything particular about this card, the specs look as follows:

• 32MB DDR SGRAM with 128bit bus;
• 150MHz memory and core frequency;
• No HyperZ support;
• 2 rendering pipelines with three texturing modules on each.

So, RADEON LE is just an ordinary RADEON with 32MB of memory and deprived of HyperZ technology (disabled in the card drivers). The core and memory frequencies are also somewhat lower, which helped ATI save a bit on the chipset cooler. According to the tests, RADEON LE performs close to RADEON SDR. If you are looking for more details, you may check the Korean Kbench.
And now a few words about the price. In Japan RADEON LE is selling for about $110. But what was even more surprising, it’s the availability of this graphics card in the US! According to pricewatch, it is selling for $95. So, the new product from ATI appears another serious competitor to NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, because RADEON LE is cheaper and faster than NVIDIA’s baby.