Radeon cards

[alewisa]

Originally posted by 103er-Fan
Damn, forgot to search there
Anyways, I ordered the HIS Radeon 9700 a few hours ago, I hope it'll be here around wednesday. When I have it, I will post some experiences about the switch from the Parhelia to the Radeon in this forum.
And if I don't like the card, I'll just send it back

Is that the 9700 or the 9700Pro - or is there a difference??!

[103er-Fan]

The Radeon 9700 is only clocked at 275/270, the 9700 Pro would be clocked at 325/310. But the chip itself is the same.

[alewisa]

And I'm sure you'll tweak it a bit! Enjoy, look fwd to reading your opinion of it... might influence my decision!

[103er-Fan]

If I am very lucky, I'll get it tomorrow, but I doubt it, I think wednesday would be much more realistic

I am not much into overclocking, actually I never really overclocked my cards, the only one I actually overclocked was my Voodoo3 3000 back in 1999, It ran at around 185 Mhz (default: 166) which wasn't bad. When I got my V5 5500, I also tried to verclock it once, but I wasn't able to get it higher than 172 MHz (default: 166) with the stock cooling. Since I didn't want to break it, I haven't overclocked or modified it.

But I think I'll try it with the Radeon, from what I've heard, I should be able to reach at least 300 MHz core clock, and if the specification from HIS is right, the RAM (3,3 ns; the non-Pro standard is 3,6) could reach 300 MHz. Oh well, time will tell, I am more excited about the actual FSAA performance and I am wondering how it compares to the Parhelia in terms of speed and quality. I doubt that it will beat FAA in some cases, but in some it will even beat FAA with 2xFSAA...

[Indiana]

According to some reports on the net ATI apparently have disabled overclocking on the R9700 non-Pro cards, at least with the common overclocking tools for the 9700Pro.

[Helevitia]

Originally posted by Indiana
According to some reports on the net ATI apparently have disabled overclocking on the R9700 non-Pro cards, at least with the common overclocking tools for the 9700Pro.

I think some of the 9500Pro's have been showing the same signs disabled overclocking.

Dave

[Indiana]

But then there is one that just flashed a R9700Pro BIOS on his non-Pro 9700 and since then he could use the normal oc'ing tools - with a VERY good result: he claimed about 360MHz GPU, ~330MHz RAM

[alewisa]

Right, I'm buying two. One for experimenting, and one just in case...!

Roll on Xmas!

[103er-Fan]

Got it!

Got the card yesterday, reinstalled Windows today and did some short testing.
The image quality isn't worse than the IQ of the Parhelia, at least the difference isn't huge. On the other hand though, I am only running an el'cheapo 17" Fujitsu

Installation was simple (using Omega's latest drivers), but I miss the tray icon Matrox had a bit. Driver settings are more available than on the P. but basicly the options are more or less the same. What I am missing most is the gaming-profile feature from Matrox

I haven't done any real testing yet, I tried M$ Train Simulator a bit and it ran faster than it did on the P. But not that much, since it is much more CPU bound. I also tried 3dMark 2001, here is my result:

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=5309965

I don't know if that is much or not, I compared it to a benchmark over @ Tom's (the older 9500/9500Pro/9700 (p)review) and he got ~12000 on a 2,2 GHz Pentium4.

I'll try some gaming later today!

[The PIT]

Not bad scores remember Omega doesn't do drivers optimised for gaming rather for display.
Now what you need to do is going into the display drivers and set everything to max and hey everything is still playable.

[Novdid]

That's what's good about the 9500Pro, and especially with the 9700Pro!

[Indiana]

Re: Got it!

Originally posted by 103er-Fan

Installation was simple (using Omega's latest drivers), but I miss the tray icon Matrox had a bit.

ATI has a driver icon, but this one is disabled (if you consult the readme "on purpose", but still I don't know why) by the Omega/Plutonium drivers. It should be possible to reenable it in the "Eigenschaften von Anzeige" / "Erweitert" / "Optionen". There just check the "Anwendung ATI-Tasklesitensymbol aktivieren" and "ATI-Symbol auf der Taskleiste anzeigen" boxes.