ABIT’s lineup

ABIT’s ATI announcement at CES earlier this month came at quite an unusual time. Normally in the graphics industry, product announcements coincide with the debut of the graphics chip. For example, ASUS waited for ATI before announcing its lineup of RADEON XT cards. ABIT on the other hand, announced their partnership with ATI right in the middle of a product cycle. This makes things more difficult for ABIT, as they have less time to get their product(s) based on that chip designed, manufactured, marketed, and distributed before ATI releases its next generation part. Remember, the graphics industry operates on a strict 6-month product cycle.

In addition, ABIT missed the important holiday shopping season. The month of January is historically very slow in the PC market, corporations and consumers have spent all their money. ABIT needed to get their product to market as quickly as possible before ATI released their next generation parts and the fanfare of the ABIT announcement faded. Therefore ABIT has decided to go with ATI’s reference board for their initial RADEON 9800 XT venture.

Head-to-head-to-head comparison

Single slot cooling on the ABIT

Stylish design

By now you’re probably pretty familiar with ATI’s RADEON 9800 XT VPU. Its 412MHz R360 graphics core boasts a true eight pixel pipeline architecture and is paired with a 256-bit DDR memory interface, with the memory subsystem operating at 365MHz (730MHz effective). These figures add up to 23.4GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth and up to 3.3Mtexels/sec peak fill rate. This allows you to crank up the screen resolution and turn on all the eye candy features (including anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering) without suffering through a virtual slideshow in regards to performance.

Unlike their GeForce4 Ti 4200 OTES card, ABIT sticks to these specifications to the letter. None of the board’s components deviate in the slightest from ATI’s reference clock speeds. This means that ABIT’s RADEON 9800 XT card should perform just like every other RADEON 9800 XT card out on the market.

ABIT motherboards

Before we move on, we would like to clarify ABIT’s relationship with NVIDIA. One of the rumors floating around was that ABIT had ceased its working relationship with NVIDIA, including their line of nForce/nForce2 motherboards such as the popular NF7 series.

Retail packaging

In the box

In order to dispel this rumor, ABIT issued a press release shortly after announcing its graphics partnership with ATI reaffirming its support for NVIDIA core-logic, including nForce3. ABIT plans to announce follow-on products based on NVIDIA’s system processors in the coming weeks.