Some wait for NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 and other wait for ATI code-named R360. There are those, who already collect money on next-generation R400 and NV40 graphics cards and there are people, who use the most feature-rich graphics card of today, the ALL-IN-WONDER 9800 PRO.

We told you some time ago that the RADEON 9900 PRO VPU will feature 420MHz core-clock, up 40MHz from the RADEON 9800 PRO, though, it does not mean that RADEON 9800 PRO cannot achieve higher speeds. Just like in case of the recent announcements of the RADEON 9600 PRO products with boosted performance in order to successfully compete with the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra (see this news-story for more information), Crucial today unveiled its RADEON 9800 PRO graphics card running at higher speeds compared to the reference so to achieve higher speeds to rival the GeForce FX 5900.

Crucial RADEON 9800 PRO is made using ATI’s own reference design for 128MB graphics cards on the most-powerful VPU. It features the same D-Sub, DVI-I and TV-Out connectors, just like all other solutions based on this graphics processor. Despite of ATI’s recommendations, Crucial’s RADEON 9800 VPU is clocked at 400MHz. Although the firm does not declare the speeds of its memory, since Crucial utilizes 2.8ns chips, I hope that memory speed will not be lower than original 680MHz.

I expect more graphics cards on the RADEON 9800 and RADEON 9600 to come with boosted speeds. This should help ATI Technologies and its partners to fight solutions based on NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 and 5600 GPUs.