The card

The card we received for this review was the standard ATI reference design, which is the one you're going to buy on retail (perhaps with a different sticker, but the card remains the same). It follows the now traditional 3:1 pixel shader to ROP ratio that ATI has introduced with its latest products, thus having 24 pixel shader units and 8 ROPs. The RV560 is connected to the 256MB of GDDR3 via an 128bit bus, and its clocks are 575MHz for the core and 675MHz for the memory.

As you can see the card is of medium size, so you don't have to worry that it won't fit into your case, like the new goliath-sized cards by the two leading GPU companies.

You don't even need external power connected to the card; the PCI-e bus supplies more than enough juice for it.

These two connectors on top are the new "Native Crossfire" connectors. Pair two of those cards together, and two of the connectors you see beside the card, and the result?

Yes, Crossfire without an external dongle.

Yes, that's the X1650XT under a Geforce 8800GTX. Just thought it would be funny to put the cards in the same picture for comparison purposes :)