true most of us can't afford a 1500 dollar monitor to reach that resolution anyhow, plus alot of people now are moving to LCD displays that have a 'native resolution' that you don't really want to go above .
R520 frequency goes to 700+ MHzDepends on the yieldsBy Fuad Abazovic: Monday 18 July 2005, 13:06WE DISCOVERED that ATI wants the R520 to clock at 700 MHz clock or even higher but it's still undecided as it's too early to decide on the final number. The chip is taped out and in acceptably good shape.It still has some time so it won't release those chips in August - it aims to introduce and ship the cards toward the very end of Q3.We reported a while back that R520 chips are aimed to work at 600+ MHz but it seems that this number might finish closer to 700+ MHz if the numbers are good, and after the third re-spin, the numbers are good. Some chips will work at even higher frequencies, much more than 700 MHz.Two of our knowledgeable and unlinked contacts suggested that R520 might actually have only sixteen fragment pipelines but will be able to fight Nvidia with its ultra higher clock but this is something that we cannot confirm at this stage. We previously suggested that R520 will end up with 24 or even more pipelines but we are advised that companies are counting pipelines differently and that now it's all programmable.Nvidia still has a huge advantage as it's happy with numbers and is shipping quantities of its Geforce 7800GTX even people are rather spending money on vacations now than on graphic cards. It will pick it up at the last week of August at the back to school time and Nvidia will be there to cash it while ATI will be a few weeks late for that. The fight continues.
Nvidia's G71 is also dual slotTwo upcoming 3D kings filling up neighbouring slotBy Theo Valich: Saturday 16 July 2005, 08:03THE GREEN Goblin and his minions were very worried about their answer to upcoming R520 monster from the jolly Canadians. You see, G71 is the secret code name for a green answer to red danger. The PCB on which G71 chip resides is almost identical to the one used in GeForce 7800GTX, with the only thing really changing the cooling and number of memory modules, of course.After the company from Satan Clara learned that R520 is going to use dual slot copper cooling in X850XT Press Edition-style, it gave the green light to the engineers that are trying to make the board to break every speed record set by Nvidia's G70 and ATU's R520 - OC gurus such as Macci and Oppainter excluded, of course.The "Faster G70", which is how the G71 is being called internally now, targets almost insane clock speeds. We have learned that several boards achieved a clock speed of 800MHz, which just goes to prove that tweaks being done in 110nm G71 core will make R520 tremble, and force ATI to respond with its 32-pipe R580 as soon as possible. However, we have to warn you that we haven't been able to find out in what environment this clockspeed was achieved. But it was achieved using new and improved two-slot cooling, not water or phase-change cooling.On prototype boards, cooling solution is separated in two halves, with nicely sized 72 or 80mm fan in the middle. Both halves feature large number of aluminium fins, through which two heat pipes lead the heat from the center block (hidden under the fan) which covers the GPU completely. Also, background of the board is identical to the one found on 7800GTX (plastic "heatspreaders" on GDDR-3 memory, plastic stabilizator on to release strain on the PCB).So, to sum what we know about G71, possibly dubbed the 7800 Ultra:- 110nm process, modestly revised GPU- unexpected clockspeed (up till' this story, of course)- dual-slot aluminium cooling with at least four heatpipes- ultra-silent, large-fin large-diameter fan- 512 MB of GDDR-3 memory, provided by Samsung. Capacity of the chips: unknown
