Sources close to the company have confirmed that the R600 PRO is designed to fight Nvidia’s Geforce 8600 GTS and it is supposed to arrive very soon.
The R600 PRO is an R600 with a few Shaders disabled, but according to our sources this chip should be enough to fight and beat the 8600 GTS in most of the benchmarks.
We don’t know what the fixed launch date is, but we expect it within a few weeks time. The key thing is that the R600 PRO or Radeon HD 2900 PRO will use the fallen R600 chips, the ones where not all of the Shaders works.