The chaps over at VR-Zone spotted some R600 cards at CeBIT and managed to get some shots on the retail R600XTX (Radeon X2900 XTX) card. They also have posted some preliminary benchmarks and it looks like the R600XTX is slightly faster than 8800GTX.

Just a recap of what we have told you before, R600XTX retail card is codenamed Dragonhead 2. It is a 12-layer card at 9.5" long with a max TDP of 240W. It is clocked at 800MHz on 80nm process technology, 512-bit memory interface and has 1GB GDDR4 memories onboard. It has 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe connectors but two 2x3 PCIe power can be used. Rumors surfaced over at CeBIT that the final product may be on 65nm if it can be produced in time with reasonable good yield. So far we have yet to get a confirmation that the first shipping R600 cards will be on 65nm but we can't rule out that there are experimental R600 chips at 65nm now. If our source is right, the yield at 65nm is poor at this point of time and expect a limited quantity of 20,000 pieces of R600XTX by middle of April.

Next, we got hold of some preliminary benchmarks figures of the R600 XTX card with core clock at 800MHz vs a GeForce 8800 GTX card. Using a Core 2 Extreme 2.93GHz processor on an Intel 975X board, the 3DMark06 score at 1600x1200 resolution is 97xx on the R600XTX compared to 95xx on the 8800GTX. Seems like R600XTX is running slightly faster than 8800GTX on the early release of drivers for R600. AMD is still working hard on the drivers and there are some more performance left to unlock. However, the DX10 benchmarking war between ATi and NVIDIA has not started yet. The targeted display driver version for launch in May is 8.361 or later (Catalyst 7.4 or 7.5).