ATI's upcoming Radeon X1900 GT GPU appears to have slipped out early. Boards based on the chip aren't expected to arrive until 9 May, but at least one store from the US retail chain Best Buy put a handful of the units on sale this week, an online report alleges.

And Digit-Life.com has the pictures to prove it. The box-shot shows the board ships with 256MB of GDDR 3 SDRAM clocked, the site claims, to 594MHz (1.188GHz effective). It adds that the core runs at 575MHz during bouts of 3D acceleration and a more power-friendly 500MHz when doing 2D work.

ATI's plan to launch the X1900 GT emerged last month. The part is said to be a cut-down version of the X1900 XT, reducing the pixel shader count from 48 to 36, and reducing the maximum memory size supported from 512MB to 256MB. ®