ATI Radeon 9800 SE Revealed

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The first reference to the Radeon 9800 SE could be found in the original Catalyst 3.5 release notes, that have been revamped after ATI launched their new website on June 28, 2003. Information about this card has been rare but with time passing, more and more specs have been revealed and we have gathered all the known specifications for you including two board photo's. German translation available over here

Take the green pill or the red pill? According to our sources ATI is going to position the 9800 SE as an ultra value product somewhere between Radeon 9600 Pro (160-200 Euro) and the upcoming Radeon 9800 Non-Pro (somewhere around ~300 Euro). UK based ATI AiB partner Connect3D is showing a core clock of 325Mhz and a memory clock of 620Mhz (effective) for the 9800 Non-Pro. Most likely the Radeon 9800 SE will remain an OEM product but we might also see some 3rd party retail cards especially in far east, e.g. China. As you can see in the picture's the layout of the card is slightly different from what we are used to. The Radeon 9800 SE will require an external 3V power supply (similar to the Radeon 9700 Pro) and in contrast to the 5V connector from the 9800 Pro. There is also another supposed photo of an 9800 SE, that completely lacks any power connector: View. Core and memory clock will be settled around the values or slightly below the Radeon 9800: 325/620Mhz (effective). We believe that anything near 300Mhz core and ~500Mhz memory is realistic. The card will feature 128MB TSOP memory and a 128Bit memory bus which is just perferctly normal for value main stream graphics cards. Simultanously the 9800 SE has 4 parallel rendering pipelines and 2 parallel geometry engines and has been equipped with the R350 F-Buffer technology; the card is based on this chip. SmartShader 2.1, SmoothVision 2.1 and HyperZ III+ are supported as well. Of course this is an DirectX 9 card. Last but not least the card carries the usual rich connection possibilities, which have become the ATI standard: dual display but comes with an additional integrated VIVO video input output port. First news on performance that we received settles the card at ~3300 3DMark 03 points. Note: All these specifications have been gathered from various international sources. By no means these are officially approved by ATI. Please remember this when reading the article.