Well, the last time we mentioned ATI RADEON 8500XT chip in our news and articles was the CeBIT 2002 Coverage. Quite a lot of time and quite many events have passed since then, so that we got an impression that this chip has been already announced long time ago (to tell the truth it has hardly any huge difference from the predecessor: 300MHz/600MHz DDR against 275MHz/550MHz DDR).

However, now, two months later at the Computex 2002 show we discovered that Gigabyte (one of ATI’s closest partners) was showcasing its "newest RADEON 8500XT Ultra AP128D-H3 graphics solution based on RADEON 8500XT chip", which has just started shipping. Here is a pic for you:

The card works at 300MHz chip and 600MHz DDR memory frequencies, is equipped with 128MB of memory, D-Sub, DVI-I and TV-Out. At first sight we may get the impression that it is an overclocked RADEON 8500 based card with 128MB of memory onboard, which we have already seen in early February (see this news story). However, if we check this page we will find out that the regular 128MB RADEON 8500 based solution is now also working at 300MHz (2.4Gtexels), even though it used to be equal to the standard 275MHz by the time RADEON 8500 came out. And why are we talking about some RADEON 8500XT then? Should we regard it as Gigabyte’s invention?

Well, ATI is full of surprises as usual. Is seems to us that very soon, even ATI itself will be unable to figure out anything among its own graphics solutions. Is it then surprising that many graphics card makers consider NVIDIA family much easier to understand and hence much more attractive?