by Anton Shilov
09/02/2004 | 11:11 AM
Graphics card maker PowerColor, a subsidiary of Tul Corp., said Thursday it would add a yet another cut-down ATI RADEON 9800-based graphics card into the lineup. The firm will from now sell two RADEON 9800-series products with 128-bit memory bus, two times more narrow compared to the original RADEON 9800 specifications.
<%BANNER[article]%>Tul Corp. now offers two graphics cards powered by ATI RADEON 9800 visual processing unit with 128-bit bus under its PowerColor brand: RADEON 9800 Platinum Edition and RADEON 9800 PRO EZ. The RADEON 9800 Platinum Edition and PRO EZ graphics cards from PowerColor feature fully-fledged RADEON 9800 PRO graphics processor with 8 rendering and 4 geometry pipelines, but are based on PCBs similar to that of the RADEON 9500 PRO – with 128-bit memory bus for 128MB of DDR SDRAM memory.
The original RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB graphics cards were clocked at 385MHz/680MHz for chip/memory and equipped with 128MB of DDR SDRAM with 256-bit bus. The cut-down PowerColor’s RADEON 9800 graphics card operates at 380MHz/600MHz for chip/memory.
Cutting down the memory bus width to 128-bit from 256-bit is likely to seriously reduce performance of the graphics card in applications that rely on rapid memory access as well as in situations when full-scene antialiasing is enabled.
Tul Corp. is not the first company to offer RADEON 9800-class graphics cards with 128-bit bus. Earlier this year Sapphire Technology started to produce RADEON 9800 PRO “128-bit Edition” product, but after facing condemnation from a group of computer enthusiasts renamed its product into “RADEON 9800 128-bit Edition”. Club 3D also offers RADEON 9800 LE graphics card with 128-bit memory bus. It is unclear why PowerColor calls its cut-down product with “Platinum Edition” brand-name that marks current RADEON X800 XT high-end offering from ATI Technologies.