Our sources close to ATI's AIB partners are telling us that DAAMIT is apparently holding back the RV770 chip sales until it sells enough reference based ATI made HD 4800 series cards.

As you may already know, all of the HD 4800 series cards are based on the reference design and ATI gets a third company to make it for them. Some of the partners managed to make their own designs but if you haven't noticed by now, Asus' HD 4850 with Glaciator cooling is still using ATI's reference PCB. The only partner that has a non-reference PCB, at least when it comes to color, is Sapphire with its HD 4850 1GB version which we wrote about here. We are not sure if anything else is changed or Sapphire simply ordered some different colored PCB cards from ATI.

DAAMIT is simply holding back the RV770 chips until it gets rid of enough reference based ATI HD 4800 series cards. According to our sources, we will be able to see first real non-reference cards at the end of July, but that date isn't carved in stone for every AIB partner, as ATI simply loves certain partners more than others.