AMD readies third Radeon HD 3800-series GPU line

3830 to take on Nvidia's 8600 GTS and 9600 GT

By Tony Smith • Get more from this author

20th March 2008 11:25 GMT

AMD will next month launch the ATI Radeon HD 3830, an 'RV670'-based graphics card said to have been designed to pull the rug from under Nvidia's low-end-of-the-top-range offerings.

So claim industry moles cited by Chinese-language site HKEPC. They say the 3830 will contain the same 320 unified shader processors as the 3850 and 3870, but connect to memory over a 128-bit bus rather than the 256-bit bus the higher-spec GPUs use.

The 3830 will also be limited to 256MB of graphics memory.

The moles suggest the 3830 will be released in the middle of April, with boards costing gamers between $119 and $129 or equivalent. AMD will apparently pitch the GPU as a product more capable than Nvidia's GeForce 8600 GTS but cheaper than the recently released 9600 GT.