9700 Pro: Best puter investment I've ever made

[Byock]

Yup, the 9800Pro AIW has been a great friend to me.

Ahh, I love this card.

[Indiana]

Originally posted by dZeus
It definately is a good investment... now if only I didn't get infinite loops or other weird problems on my 875 chipset with it

So go get a decent CPU with a decent chipset: AMD Athlon64 with K8T800 (hides from the flames)...


To the original topic: yes, the 9700 is for sure one of the longest lasting gfx-cards of recent history, much better even than the G400MAX (comparable only maybe to the MillII cards). Mine is quite a bit over one year old and still plays everything full-sped, most of the time even with 4x aa and 16aniso and even easily beats most of todays cards in benchmarks (for those who care about that).

Surely this is really much due to the sudden weakness of nVidia (which after more one year later got a card out performing only similar to the 9700.. ), but still the 9700Pro is the longest lasting gfx card I ever owned.

[dZeus]

Originally posted by Indiana
So go get a decent CPU with a decent chipset: AMD Athlon64 with K8T800 (hides from the flames)...


To the original topic: yes, the 9700 is for sure one of the longest lasting gfx-cards of recent history, much better even than the G400MAX (comparable only maybe to the MillII cards). Mine is quite a bit over one year old and still plays everything full-sped, most of the time even with 4x aa and 16aniso and even easily beats most of todays cards in benchmarks (for those who care about that).

Surely this is really much due to the sudden weakness of nVidia (which after more one year later got a card out performing only similar to the 9700.. ), but still the 9700Pro is the longest lasting gfx card I ever owned.

Fortunately AMD never had problems with chipsets either. Not to mention that it's not clear what is causing this problem, since ATI is denying even seeing this problem happening, while many people have reported it.

I don't agree that the 9700 Pro is better or longer lasting than the G400, since the 9700 is really only very good at one thing, i.e. 3D processing. The G400 introduced a lot of new concepts that even to date haven't been copied over by competitors to the same quality as Matrox' implementation (think of dualhead driver modes, tv-out quality, possibility to hardware accelerate 2 displays (spanned desktop), etc).

As for long-lasting cards in 3D speed, there has been Voodoo2-SLI which has been the fastest around for a LONG time as well, and also the Geforce2 GTS.

[Indiana]

Well, for MY needs, the R9700Pro is definitely even better than the G400 was at its time.
TVOut-quality is good on the 9700Pro in PAL when using the 800x600 resolution, as long as you have the flickerfilter turned off and Overscan enabled.
And I really didn't like the stuttering bug on the G400 with DVDMax when watching PAL DVDs.

Hardware-accel over 2 displays may sound nice, but isn't exactly worthy except for sims (in shooters the cross hair would be in the middle betwee the two monitors...) and the G400 wasn't really fast enough to play anything over two monitors anyway, at least not in high resolution.

The normal "Dual Head" capabilities of the 9700 are enough for my needs (well OK, two hardware-overlays like the Parhelia has would be nice).

[Ali]

I would say that next to my voodoo2 12MB SLI and Mill2 AGP setup, my 9700Pro has to be the best graphics subsystem Ive every had. If you compare the prices, then the 9700Pro is by far the best.

But then again, my G400 is still going strong in a work machine.