Digit-life.com have posted their HIS Excalibur Radeon 9500 128MB graphics card review. Here's a snip.
The RADEON 9500 64MB and 128MB differ in the memory buses (the former has 128bit, the latter - 256bit), because both are built on RADEON 9700's PCB which supports a 256bit bus on the hardware level, and the 64MB model is obtained by removing half of the memory chips (the memory bus is therefore shorter as well). That is why RADEON 9500 128MB was much more popular as it had better performance and could be turned into RADEON 9700.
But it didn't suit ATI that the PCB used for mainstream cards was quite expensive, and the sales of RADEON 9700 could markedly fall down, as it was getting popular to change RADEON 9500 into 9700. For some time RADEON 9500 128MB cards were in very great demand. The worst thing for ATI could happen if the Chinese partners started buying cheaper RADEON 9500 GPUs from the Canadians, installing them onto R9700's PCBs and selling them as original RADEON 9700. However, such fears were exaggerated because not every RADEON 9500 can flawlessly work with 8 pipelines, and hardly anyone would take the risk of producing expensive RADEON 9700 based on 9500 (it would be necessary to carefully test every sample and cull out about 30% of such cards, which would raise the costs and make the deal unprofitable).
HIS Excalibur RADEON 9500 128MB Video Card Review
The RADEON 9500 64MB and 128MB differ in the memory buses (the former has 128bit, the latter - 256bit), because both are built on RADEON 9700's PCB which supports a 256bit bus on the hardware level, and the 64MB model is obtained by removing half of the memory chips (the memory bus is therefore shorter as well). That is why RADEON 9500 128MB was much more popular as it had better performance and could be turned into RADEON 9700.
But it didn't suit ATI that the PCB used for mainstream cards was quite expensive, and the sales of RADEON 9700 could markedly fall down, as it was getting popular to change RADEON 9500 into 9700. For some time RADEON 9500 128MB cards were in very great demand. The worst thing for ATI could happen if the Chinese partners started buying cheaper RADEON 9500 GPUs from the Canadians, installing them onto R9700's PCBs and selling them as original RADEON 9700. However, such fears were exaggerated because not every RADEON 9500 can flawlessly work with 8 pipelines, and hardly anyone would take the risk of producing expensive RADEON 9700 based on 9500 (it would be necessary to carefully test every sample and cull out about 30% of such cards, which would raise the costs and make the deal unprofitable).
HIS Excalibur RADEON 9500 128MB Video Card Review
