ATI Radeon 9700 Pro Video Card

Company: ATI Technologies
Product: Radeon 9700 Pro Video Card
Street Price: ~$399 USD
Date Reviewed: October 19, 2002
Reviewed By: Joey C. aka Chong345
Rating: (9/10)

After removing the contents of the box, I had to get a look at the card and measure it up against the GeForce 4 Ti4600. It's noticeably smaller than a GeForce 4 Ti4600, a more comparable size equivalent would be against a Ti4200 or Ti4400 card. The extra power connector comes pre-attached to the card, and on the card it uses the same type of power connector as a floppy drive, but they give you a power connector that goes from the floppy connector to a typical 4-pin Molex pass-thru connector. This was convenient, especially for people who don't have many (or any) power connectors free.

The heat sink on the card is large. It has a small fan on it to keep the GPU cool and fight off the heat. The memory modules on the card are all Samsung chips, which is a good thing as Samsung provides some of the best memory available and are pretty much an industry standard. Other things that I would like to note are that the card has a big metal plate on the back of it. I do not exactly know what is under this plate but it did seem to get warm after the later testing. The rest of the layout is typical of a video card. The contents of the package as listed above were all well packaged and all the necessary cables and connections are already provided. The only thing that I found strange was that there is no extra software such as games or demos included with 9700. Some people like getting the games that come with the cards, especially if they paid $400 for a video card.

Overclocking the Radeon 9700 is just as easy as the GeForce 4's are. I used the latest version of Powerstrip and it worked just fine. I tried other software such as Rivatuner but it did not work, it didn't even detect the stock clocks on the Radeon video card. I'm assuming this is because the card is so new and the authors just need to update their program to recognize the card. With stock cooling and 33C case temperatures, I was able to hit 380 MHz on the core and 350 MHz on the memory. Stock on the card is 325/310 (core/memory). Keep in mind that 310 is the true speed for the memory but the transfer rate is doubled so some refer to it as 620. This way you can get an idea of how it compares to the GeForce 4. With more extreme cooling methods, I have seen others hit much higher.

For testing purposes and to show just how well the 9700 performs, I used my Visiontek GeForce 4 Ti4600 for a comparison. I only used stock speeds on both cards and then I went on to overclock the Radeon to show how much better an overclocked 9700 performs versus a stock 9700 and the performance gained. The BIOS settings were all set to default except that I changed AGP Aperture to 128 and enabled fast writes. Other than that, everything was stock. All the tests were performed with a fresh install of drivers and everything set to default in the display options. No other software tweaks or anything of that nature was used. In addition, I used the graphics drivers on the CD that came with the 9700 which are version 61.43, and I downloaded the 40.72 drivers for the GeForce 4, which at the time were the latest drivers on the NVIDIA website.

Testing:

Tests Used:

• 3DMarks 2001 SE
• Unreal Tournament 2003 Benchmark Demo
• Quake 3 Arena Demo 1
• Code Creatures Pro

I chose these particular tests because 3DMarks, for the most part, is a standard for benchmarking graphics cards and is a decent indicator of how a card performs in the real world. Unreal Tournament 2003 was just recently released, it has some good graphics and is the latest in gaming engines. Quake 3 Arena is not really a great benchmark anymore and it is quickly becoming outdated, but people like to see it so I figured I would toss it in the review. Code Creatures uses an actual game engine and is not just a demo, in addition, it is very hard on graphics cards and high frame rates are almost non-existent. After you see the results from these tests, you will get an idea of how much better the 9700 really is compared to the GeForce 4. Obviously, it is going to be faster but how much faster?

Go To Page 3 For 3DMarks 2k1 & UT2k3 Benchmarks -->