The Radeon 9700

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

The ATI Radeon 9700 Pro is the world’s first DirectX 9 compliant AGP graphics card, and one of the first significant AGP 8x cards (The SiS Xabre also features AGP 8x, but the power of the card itself isn’t nearly enough to utilize the bandwidth.).

It features a core with eight pipelines and a speed of 325MHz and 128MB of 256-bit DDR running at 620MHz. The 256-bit DDR effectively doubles the memory bandwidth, so it’s got almost twice as much memory bandwidth as its nearest competitor, the NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600. It is built on the 0.15 micron process (with a 0.13u version rumoured to come later this year).

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Here’s the card itself…that little power wire leads out to a 4 pin Molex splitter which hooks into your computer’s PSU. Thankfully, since it’s a splitter, it doesn’t take up a whole connection like a hard drive would.

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Back panel of the card is rather basic; VGA, S-Video Out, and a DVI connector (a DVI to VGA adapter is included)

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They exceeded my expectations here– not only a nice long composite cable, but a nice long S-Video cable, and an S-Video to Composite converter for older TV sets.

Obviously there’s also a manual and CD in the box, but I didn’t feel it was necessary to take a picture of that.

Enough talk—let’s get right into the good stuff.

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