DH Interview: ATI's Prasad Sristi

Zardon

I recently had time to chat with ATI's Prasad Sristi, a Senior Product Manager and the guy in charge of the X1600 series of cards - Prasad is a very amicable guy indeed and answered an array of questions regarding the X1600.

He has also offered us some hardware as a competition, but ill go into detail more on that next week, so keep your eyes peeled on DH for more information!

Driverheaven: The X1600 had a lukewarm welcome, with many criticising ATI for making a product hindered by its 128bit memory interface. How do you respond to that? Do you feel, in retrospect, that you made all the right design decisions concerning the card?

Prasad: Out of the gate, the main complaint wasn't about the features or bandwidth but the price. It's simple psychology - you expect more out of a product if the price tag looks bigger. The X1600 XT was being evaluated as a $249 product, which was the MSRP. The street price was expected to be $179 at launch. Today you can buy the X1600 XT for $149. If I give the X1600 XT now to a gamer and told him it's an ATI graphics product available for $149, he'd be thrilled with the performance.

You can read the full interview over here

Gnerma

Good interview Zardon, you seemed to ask the tough questions and there are many when it comes to X1600s. The X1600 IS a lukewarm midrange part, and in my view its the second such lukewarm midrange part ATi has dropped in a row (X700). It lags behind 6600GTs in most games which can be found for the same price or cheaper much less the 7600GT which can be had for as little as $170. This has left ATi to scramble and release a much more expensive to produce SKU to match Nvidia's new midrange part which *imagine this* has testicles. A midrange part with some balls is a concept ATi, again, has failed to graps for the last two product generations.

My question for Prasad would have been. "Why wasn't the X1600 spec'd more like the forthcoming X1700 to begin with?" If it had had 3 real R520 quads it would have been a decent performer even on the 128bit memory bus.

Falstaff

I cant seem to find this at Bestbuy, but my Dell runs pretty cool, the only problem with any fan cooler for laptops and anything else for that matter is the dust and the debris that always acculates..LOL
I burned one up in three months in Arizona..