During the R600 briefing in Tunis, AMD execs told us that they decided to cancel the 1GB board, due to lack of thermal stability offered by the GPU. But the crew in question told us they represent a customer centric company, so if a partner wanted to hit the market with 1GB boards, they could go right ahead. Now, Bruce Zaman, CEO of Diamond Multimedia is first guy to come out of the closet and spill the beans about the 1GB card and its future. Bruce says Diamond will be the first AMD partner to bring 1GB Radeon card to market. The firm is replacing the 512MB GDDR3 Hynix modules with highest quality, highest speed GDDR4 memory chips from Samsung, he says. - The Inquirer

AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT With 1GB to Arrive Shortly

Diamond has also overclocked the card, so now the Viper boards will come with GPU clocked at 825MHz, a very cool 83MHz faster than the stock part, while memory is clocked to 2200MHz effective clock speed. The memory bandwidth is increased to 140.8GB/s, 35GB/s more than the stock Radeon HD 2900 XT. The firm will also offer 743/2200MHz clocked boards, so the GPU will be stock, but the memory will be clocked to the heavens high. Moot point about these cards is the fact that Diamond stated that boards will be available at selected system integrators, retail pricing and availability plans were clear as mud.

We know that Diamond is not the only one to come to market with 1GB parts, we have heard voices from other AMD partners that they are also bringing these parts to market, so you can expect that AMD's Radeon HD 2900 XT line-up will consist of two, not one SKU. It remains to be seen how AMD will support this board with drivers, because even the stock part Radeon HD 2900 XT does not perform as expected, mostly down to drivers not being mature enough. And this part was only nine months late. The original plan called for R600 launch in the second week of September, not November, as some are inclined to say.