ATI's reference card.. you ain't gonna see this for $99
Here's the reference card, as supplied by ATI. We reckon that all partners will have to, initially at least, take the same cooler as found on the HIS. This one looks more akin to a scaled-down Radeon HD 4870's. It's a better, beefier, more-expensive jobbie than the ATI-built model that partners receive, and this one won't see the light of day....not at $99, anyway.
No difference here.
The larger heatsink/cooler
looks better, in our opinion, but it also takes up the adjacent slot,
as well.
Generally very quiet when pootling around in the operating system and in most games, the reference model had a tendency to spin up at full speed for a second or two - just as most cards do when running through the pre-OS POST sequence.
Other than the larger
cooler that we've
seen before, the technical specifications of the reference card are
the same, that is, 750MHz core and 3,200MHz memory.
