Radeon X1800XT & X1600 will come in two flavours

@ 2005/09/12
ATI DECIDED to put some additional pressure on Nvidia’s 7800GTX. Its soon to be released card will feature 512MB of memory. This memory is not such a big deal but in the eyes of consumers means the world to them. We confirmed that two flagship Radeons X1800XT and X1800PRO will come as 512MB cards.
The Radeon X1800 XL will be more affordable 256 MB card but less memory means a lower price, of course. Nvidia will have to respond with a 512MB version of Geforce 7800GTX and we suspect that the green company from California plans to drop the prices of its 256MB models at the same time.

ATI is using some fast memory this time and as you could imagine 512MB of memory clocked at 1400 or 1250MHz might be an expensive piece of architecture.

We will see about the availability in first week of October as this is the planed launch date. We don’t want to get into specifics as each time we reported about a fixed date, ATI all of a sudden decided to change it for a day or a two.

http://theinquirer.net/?article=26106

ATI IS PREPARING a lot of surprises for its first week of October launch. Not only it will launch at least four versions of famous and troublesome R520 high end marchitecture, it is planning to release its Shader model 3.0 versions of a mainstream solution.
The card that we used to call RV530 got its commercial name and will be called the Radeon X1600 and will come in two flavors. The faster version of its architecture will be called Radeon X1600 and will have twelve pipelines and work at a 600MHz plus clock. The clock speeds are being finalised as we speak, but this sounds like a very fast mainstream card to me.

RV530 is re-named to the Radeon X1600 and we will possibly start to call this card a Standard. This core will also feature twelve pipelines and will work at faster clocks than 500MHz, that's still under development.

We have to say that X1 could be also read as eleven following the previous ATI´s naming/numbering nomenclature. Radeon 7000, 8000, 9x00, X (X – number ten in the Latin alphabet) and now X1 as eleven.

ATI is truly the Canadian Cabalist.

ATI will introduce the X1600 generation with X1300 cards in the first week of October together with its flagship R520, Radeon X1800 generation. µ

Comment from jmke @ 2005/09/12
it will all boil down to price/performance, and for some.. features.

however, the card which provides the most BANG at $100-150 will ultimately be to victor imho. Much like the Ti200 did better then the original Geforce3, similar that the ATI R9500Pro did better then 9700Pro in sales.

interesting to see if any of these cards will have "modding" possibilities, but it won't be what the main public is looking for.