9700/9500pro

[BowlingNut]

anyone seen these cards for sale yet? i'm very interested in picking up the 9700 non pro. ive serached pricewatch, but found absolutely nothing, just wondering if yall found any for sale yet?
tia

 

[Deeko]

I don't believe they are available for sale, no. If you read Anandtech's review, they didn't even appear to be totally final hardware.

 

[ScrewFace]

I believe the RADEON 9700 and the RADEON 9500 PRO will be available by the end of November.

 

[tuan121]

im waiting on the 9500pro. Hope it is around 150ish. hehehe! wishful thinking!

 

[AnAndAustin]

You can look out for the 4200 which use the longer board design from the 4400/4600 cards and the faster 3.3ns BGA RAM which can be unoff called '4300'. Even the standard 4200 cards are very good although there are a couple of turkeys to avoid, manu makes very little diff, a std 4200 should easily exceed 4400 speeds and are great value. The Asus is the weakest of the '4300' cards (see below) so you'd be better off with a 4400 or maybe even a 4600 unless they are a lot more expensive. For reference a 4200 with the same RAM size running at the same clocks as a 4400 or 4600 give IDENTICAL perf. Std clocks are 4200-64MB=250/500 4200-128MB=250/444 4200-8X-128MB=250/500 4400=275/550 4600=300/650.

HardOCP Asus Deluxe '4300' expected o/c=300/640
PCStats Albatron P Turbo '4200' expected o/c=300/700+
Xbit Suma Special Edition '4300' expected o/c=300/700+

The Rad9500PRO (a fair bit faster than Rad9500) is 'only' roughly on par with a TI4200 and will almost certainly have the odd glitch, be priced high and with low availability for a good month or so, all you really gain is slightly better AA, AF and DX9 ... although the 9500PRO card should exceed 4600 speeds once they are 100% final and the drivers mature. The 9700 seems a much wiser buy, otherwise IMHO it makes more sense to get a std GF4TI4200 for pure cost effectiveness or '4300', 4400 or 4600 if you want that bit more. Oh yeah and don't expect DX9 to be of any real benefit for at least 12 months!

 

[Torghn]

9700 looks like the card to get.

 

[nardvark]

anyone else noticed the huge performance differences in the different 9500pro reviews about a week ago? I think it probably has a lot to do with the fact that the 9500pro only had 64mb of memory available, and the benchmarkers were choosing very different detail settings...
I saw some where the 9500pro was basically on part with a 4600, and some where it was barely keeping up with a 4200.
Anyone else have any clue why it varied so much?
I'm just going to wait until the retail models come out until I really judge the performance...

 

[AnAndAustin]

Yeah the hw like their drivers aren't 100% finalised yet so it is only good for a rough idea. How the 9500PRO fairs will vary as sites prob used diff AA/AF and detail settings to help/hurt the 64MB limit, either way the Rad9500's are a little disappointing, it's surprised me just how much of 9700PRO's speed comes from 256bit DDR. Comparing a Rad9500PRO 4xAA 16tap AF with a GF4TI using 4xAA and 8xAF (eff 16tap) gives a very diff picture than if the GF4TI was using 2xAA and 4xAF (eff 8tap), sure the Rad would look nicer but the GF4TI would be MUCH faster than at 4xAA & 8xAF. 4200-4600 or Rad9700 seem the ways to go at the moment. Of course 9500 and 9700 series cards should be speeding up as the drivers mature and prices should come down over the next few months ... still it's great to have the choice and all prices will be steadily falling thanks to the great competition.