ATI Add-in-Board-Manufacturers have launched the first graphics cards based on the ATI X550 chipset. Although ATI's Radeon X550 chip doesn't appear on the company's website, Taiwanese vendor Info-Tek has announced a pair of graphics cards based on the X550 series.

One such board partner is GeCube. The company showcased its implementation of the Radeon X550 video card at Computex, Taipei. The GameCube Radeon X550 which is set to replace the Radeon X300 and X600 series. The GPU is manufactured on TSMC's 0.11-micron FAB process - the same process that is used on the Radeon X300 series.

Information about the X550 has also been found in ATI's latest Catalyst driver, 5.6, verifying that it's a genuine ATI product.

The X550 is essentially a higher-clocked X300. It's based on the same core as the older chip, the RV370, with four pixel pipelines, a pair of vertex engines and a 128-bit memory interface. While the X300 is clocked at 325MHz, the X550 comes in at 400MHz. That ups the fill rate from 1.3bn texels per second to 1.6bn.

Hong Kong's HIS has also announced an X550-based board, the HIS X550 iFan, again with 128MB of on-board DDR SDRAM, clocked to 500MHz and operating across a 128-bit bus. HyperMemory expands the total memory available to the GPU to 256MB. The maximum supported resolution is 2048 x 1536.