The Radeon 9700 Pro core is clocked at 325MHz, while the 128MB of DDR memory runs at a blistering 620MHz. This my friends, is fast. The board itself is smaller than the GeForce4 Ti4600, and boasts a bright red PCB. The new GPU utilizes a flip-chip type packaging, similar to the current Athlon and Pentium CPUs, and takes up a fair amount of space on the board. A large black heatsink is installed over the GPU, sporting the ATI logo on the fan. Not extremely flashy, but nonetheless effective. The Samsung memory is rated at 700MHz DDR, as shown by their site. This could make for some interesting overclocking. The memory modules do not include heatsinks, something I’m sure other 9700 Pro builders will quickly take advantage of. The 9700 Pro requires an additional power connector to draw from the power supply, and the ATI website recommends a 300W power supply when running the card. If the small Molex connector is not attached, the system will not POST. Yes, we tried.
We tested the 9700 in the fastest system we could get our hands on, which happened to be a P4 2.53GHz box. After running our initial tests, it became painfully obvious that our Athlon XP 1800+ just didn’t have the horsepower to push this new beast, and at times the P4 rig couldn’t keep up either. I did experience some compatibility issues with the Radeon and one particular motherboard we had in the office. I had originally intended to run the benchmarks on the new Abit SR7-8X, but we have been unable to get the Radeon to function properly in this board. There are some documented issues with the SIS 648 chipset, which will hopefully be worked out soon. The problem stems from the AGP 8X implementation in the SIS 648 chipset, so hopefully a BIOS update or future revision of the Radeon 9700 will rememdy this problem. It should be noted that some people have been able to get this combination to work, but despite over two weeks of testing, alas ours did not. We instead used a Soyo Intel 645 equiped board, running at AGP 4X. Testing at 4X rather than 8X may give us slightly lower scores, but overall the difference should be minimal. And, most people do not have 8X mainboards yet, so this is an accurate real-world test. Before we get into the scores, a huge thanks goes out to our man Chris for providing the P4 rig and GeForce4 Ti4600 for testing. No harm was done, I promise.
Test System
- Intel Pentium 4B 2.53GHz
- 512MB Mushkin PC2700 DDR
- Soyo P4S-645DX
- 430W Antec TruePower Power Supply
- Windows 2000
- Catalyst 2.3, Build 13.01.6166
- NVIDIA Detonator 30.82
- ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
- Asus GeForce4 Ti4600
- ATI Radeon 8500
Benchmarks
- Mad Onion’s 3DMark 2001SE
- Quake 3 Arena
- Jedi Knight II
- Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
- Flight Sim 2002
- Code Creatures
- Comanche 4
- Unreal Tournament 2003
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