AnandTech's R520, RV530 and RV515 Pre-NDA Extravaganza

ATI's RV530 aka Radeon X1600

Targetting the upper midrange is the Radeon X1600 (RV530), built on the same 90nm process as the Radeon X1800 (R520). All of these RV530 series and lower are single slot products, according to the roadmaps.

Radeon X1600 will actually be very similar to X1800LE, but with a smaller internal bus (256-bits) and a smaller memory bus (128-bits). The X1600 cards also have H.264 support like the R520 series.

Like X600, there will be many vendor dependent options for the cards. The configuration roadmap allows for DDR1, DDR2 or GDDR3 in both the XT and Pro cards, with memory sizes ranging anywhere from 128MB to 512MB. In fact, we even have claims from one manufacturer that they will produce 64-bit versions of the card en masse; so potential buyers will need to be wary of buying Radeon X1600 Pro cards with the smaller bus (like with the Radeon 9800SE). Another noteable is the support for HDCP and HDMI on many cards. Also, like with the GeForce 7800 series, vendors are allowed (perhaps even encouraged?) to bin chips for higher clock speeds. We've received reports from AIBs that some RV530 Pro cards will ship with 525MHz clock speeds even though the roadmap indicates 500MHz is the standard configuration.

Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of RV530 is the low power consumption. Reference 64-bit boards of RV530 using GDDR3 at 500MHz core clock speeds have a power consumption of just 25W. 128-bit boards were estimated at 40W and X1600XT boards with all the goodies were estimated by AIBs to be 55W.