ATI's September's refresh mainstream card codenamed RV730XT will be selling for $149. We are talking about the faster of two RV730 cards. This card should compete with Geforce 8500GT and soon to come 9500GT which sells in the $99 to $149 market.
The RV730PRO will obviously be slower but both cards with
come with 1GB of memory. We are not sure how fast are these cards compared to
RV635 or Radeon 3650 but as always we're expecting the new generation to be significantly faster. We don’t know what kind of memory you get with
these cards or how wide the memory bus is but we will certainly try to find
out.
With 3850 being incredibly cheap we suspect that ATi will
have to end of life the Radeon 3000 series to have any chance of selling its
new RV730 and RV715 products.
At least on the graphics side ATI has never been better but
graphics is not enough to get AMD out of financial and leadership trouble.