After seing a Powercolor 9700 non-pro roughly at the same price as a regular 9500 pro I did a bit of research - rage3d foruns may be kind of a jungle, but they do have lots of valuable information.
I went for it. Instalation was a breeze. I Did the warp11 bios flash trick - for those not familiar with ATI hacks, non-pro 9700´s have locked bios, preventing any sort of overclocking. Fortunatly some guy found how to hack it. It´s now clocked at 320/292 from 275/270. A pro´s default clocks are 320/310, the memory handicap was expected as it has 3.3ns ram instead of the 2.8 found on pro cards.
And yes, it´s as good as they say.
Catalyst 3.1 drivers seem very mature to me. Performance skyrocketed, specially on higher resolutions or with AA/aniso. On the latest settings it easily doubles my previous GF4 Ti framerates. It´s really nice to play UT2003 at 1024x768 4xAA 16xAniso. The GF4 crawled with 2x AA/2x Aniso.
2d quality was a surprise, definitly much sharper than the Ti4400... Again, I was surprised, specially because Powercolor isn´t a premium brand.
I went for it. Instalation was a breeze. I Did the warp11 bios flash trick - for those not familiar with ATI hacks, non-pro 9700´s have locked bios, preventing any sort of overclocking. Fortunatly some guy found how to hack it. It´s now clocked at 320/292 from 275/270. A pro´s default clocks are 320/310, the memory handicap was expected as it has 3.3ns ram instead of the 2.8 found on pro cards.
And yes, it´s as good as they say.
Catalyst 3.1 drivers seem very mature to me. Performance skyrocketed, specially on higher resolutions or with AA/aniso. On the latest settings it easily doubles my previous GF4 Ti framerates. It´s really nice to play UT2003 at 1024x768 4xAA 16xAniso. The GF4 crawled with 2x AA/2x Aniso.
2d quality was a surprise, definitly much sharper than the Ti4400... Again, I was surprised, specially because Powercolor isn´t a premium brand.
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