Samples have been ready for quite some times but ATI decided to postpone cards based on the RV570 and RV560 cores. Those are ATI's first 80 nanometre cores and NVIDIA already beat ATI by shipping its 80 nanometre mobile chip called GeForce Go 7700 from some time now. The RV570 based Radeon X1950 PRO and RV560 based Radeon X1650 XT cards will be pushed back for a month and will launch on the 17th of October. The RV570 chip has 36 shader units and should cost around €199 at launch date while the RV560 chip has 24 pixel shader units, twice as much as the RV530 and RV535, and comes at 600MHz core and 1400MHz memory speed. - The Inquirer

ATI pushes Radeon X1950 PRO launch to mid-October

Maybe ATI just wants to get rid of as many Radeon X1600 PRO's as it can, before it launches the XT version as it will certainly have to drop the prices once it introduces the new and faster card. Or another logical reason would be to build up their stock for a full blow launch with major availability. That certainly is worth the wait, cause the amount of available cards at launch is quite important. Nobody likes that when you are out looking for the new graphics card that these are out of stock only some days to a week of the initial launch. Waiting time once again, but it will be worth with the nice products coming.