So, together with the official announcement ATI set up the date for the mass supplies of its new RADEON 9700 PRO to start. This is August 19. At launch I honestly doubted that this is a credible statement, and it seems to me I was right. According to our sources, they will be able to start selling ATI RADEON 9700 PRO in time only in the Asian region and only in limited quantities.

As for the USA and European markets, it will be pretty complicated to find RADEON 9700 based graphics cards there at first. It is not for nothing that some on-line hardware stores claim they will have RADEON 9700 PRO available only in mid September. The sources say that ATI will ship new cards to its USA distributors between August 27 and September 3. Moreover, the first supplies will be pretty small. The first supply of RADEON 9700 PRO to the USA is expected to contain only 3,000 pieces.

At the same time RADEON 9700 PRO should be available in much bigger quantities in the Asian region, but despite that we will not claim their broad availability anyway.

Unfortunately, there is no info about the reasons that might have caused this delay. Maybe the chip yields are lower than anticipated, and maybe inspired by the delayed launching of NV30, ATI intended to start selling its RADEON 9700 PRO as early as possible but failed to catch up with the plans of its own marketing people.