Got a R9700 today

[Nuno]

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.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

Really? cool. Power Color and 2D. That's just shocking

that's good news. congrats on ur new buy

[Nuno]

Another interesting fact was the significant noise reduction on my case. I never noticed the GF4 card actually made so much noise! Much quieter now.

Anyway, highly recomended, despite R350 being around the corner. R350 will be a expensive high-end card, RV350 being the budget card that probably will perform slower than previous generation card (R9000/8500 anyone?).

And definitly recomended over any R9500 card. 256-bit bus is really worth it.

[Helevitia]

glad you like it, I really love my 9700. The raw power is amazing! Teh fun thing to do is run slighly older games with 6xAA and 16xAF. They look great.

[BuddMan]

You should have gotten an AIW.

[Admiral]

Does the AIW have the metal shim between the VPU base and heatsink ?

[Topha]

Got AIW 8500 at the moment, its really cool. If the 9700AIW had 2 DVI/VGA outs i would have gotten it by now, but it only has 1 DVI and one TV out, like mine. I will wait till they change that before i get my next AIW

hopefully they have triplehead and TV out by then. Although a Pitou Marvel would be nice, too

[BuddMan]

Originally posted by Admiral
Does the AIW have the metal shim between the VPU base and heatsink ?

Yeah, and mine has been getting too hot. I'm about to remove it and use some Artic Alumina to paste the heatsink directly on the VPU. However, I also need to get some ariflow in my case. There is none at all because I am watercooling, but the video card is the only thing I am not watercooling (damn TV tuner in the way).

[Nuno]

AIW are cool, but it was mainly a budget oriented purchase. AIW are terribly expensive, at least over here.

[prophet]

How is it with TV Out? I had 8500 with TV Out (PAL), Theater mode (aka DVDMax) was with black borders, when I enabled overscan mode in registry, I got full screen image on TV, but slightly stretched vertically.. this was unacceptable!

[Nuno]

To be honest I haven´t tried TV-out yet.

[BuddMan]

I have a 32" HDTV, and the 9700 AIW looks pretty good but kinda fuzzy at the default resolutions. If I used powerstrip to make some custom resolutions, it would pretty damn good. In the future after I upgrade my main system, I'm gonna use the AIW card and make a HTPC computer out of it.

[prophet]

I was told by some ATI technician, this image deformation is a hardware limitation of Rage Theatre chip and that is the reason, why is TV Out overscan disabled in the drivers..

9700 should use Rage Theatre 2 chip, maybe it is fixed..

[Novdid]

Originally posted by prophet
I was told by some ATI technician, this image deformation is a hardware limitation of Rage Theatre chip and that is the reason, why is TV Out overscan disabled in the drivers..

9700 should use Rage Theatre 2 chip, maybe it is fixed..

There's no rage theater chip on the 9700 boards. All of the ramdac's and analog converters are built on chip, if I'm not misstaken.

[3dfx]

Originally posted by Novdid
There's no rage theater chip on the 9700 boards. All of the ramdac's and analog converters are built on chip, if I'm not misstaken.

You are right there Novdid