Following ATI Technologies itself, VisionTek announced availability of the RADEON 9800 PRO-based graphics cards with 256MB of DDR-II SDRAM memory. XSTASY 9800 PRO is made fully according to ATI’s reference design and costs as Microsoft XBOX and Sony PlayStation2 consoles together.

The XSTASY 9800 PRO is based on the well-known RADEON 9800 PRO VPU with 8 pixel pipelines and DirectX 9.0 support. The graphics card with 256MB of DDR-II SDRAM runs at 380/700MHz clocks for the graphics processor and 256-bit DDR-II SDRAM memory. It has a suggested retail price of $499.

VisionTek is not expecting to sell high volumes of its new card simply because of its selling price. With a suggested retail price near the cost of a complete entry-level PC system, the card will be beyond the budget of many PC gamers. Neverheless, VisionTek hopes that hardcore gamers will choose the graphics card as an ultimate solution for another three months before ATI launches something new, or NVIDIA will add more speed to its GPUs.

The XTASY 9800 PRO 256MB is available from many of VisionTek’s resellers including CompUSA and TigerDirect. Grab yours now if you have spare $499...