by Anton Shilov
11/19/2002 | 07:22 PM
FIC company showcases their new graphics cards based on the RADEON 9700, RADEON 9500 PRO and RADEON 9500 in their booth at Comdex Fall 2002.
According to FIC, they manufacture the RADEON 9700 powered graphics cards on their own facilities. FIC is the second company after TYAN to start making the RADEON 9700 based graphics cards on their own and not just reselling the devices made by ATI and its partners. Of course, both computer component makers use ATI’s reference design for their expensive products.<%BANNER[article]%>
FIC has not yet developed the RADEON 9500 PRO and RADEON 9500 based graphics cards and demonstrates the devices built by ATI, but with different labels on the fans.
What is extremely interesting, RADEON 9500 graphics cards utilises the PCB intended for the RADEON 9700 graphics card. Half of the memory is not installed, hence, the memory bus on the product is just 128-bit in contrast to 256-bit utilised on the RADEON 9700. On the other hand, there is a special PCB developed for the RADEON 9500 PRO graphics card with 4 chips of memory (32-bit x 4 = 128-bit) installed on the front-side of the board. This PCB should be a bit cheaper compared to the original one intended for the RADEON 9700. In fact, I do not understand why ATI decided to make use of an expensive print circuit board with their cheap RADEON 9500 graphics card, but developed a new PCB for a bit more expensive one.
The RADEON 9700, 9500 and 9500 PRO graphics cards should appear in retail shortly.