All Radeon HD 4870 X2 that are expected in late August and early September powered by GDDR5 memory will be built by ATI. At the same time ATI will let its partners, at least some of the skilled ones, to play with their own design of R700 dual chip card based on two RV770PRO chips and GDDR3 memory.

This will bring some a of change in this market and you will finally have something to chose from. For the time being ATI will not let partners make their own R700 based on GDDR5 due to the complexity of the boards.

Nvidia also doesn’t let its partners make Geforce GTX280 and 260 cards and it sells them as a complete package but ATI seems to have finally loosened up, at least on one of the high end SKUs. This is a good step forward as it will bring more diversity and we like that.