9700 non-pro and 9700 pro

[gregshin]

imma n00b at hardware now..whats the big difference? can the 9700 non pro be tweaked into a PRO version?

 

[fishbreath]

No. The 9700 has a half-width memory bus so the performance is considerably inferior to the 9700 pro. If you want to economize, get the 128MByte version of the 9500 Pro. There are widely available instructions for reconfiguring the 9500 Pro to its big brother's performance. But the important thing is that you must start with the correct bus width.

Recent experience. I have a Hercules 9700 Pro. Quite expensive, but doesn't have the banding problem I've seen on ATI's cards. Probably worth the extra bucks!

 

[Reliant]

The 9700 non-pro has the same memory bus (256-bit) as the 9700 Pro, just clocked slower.
The 9700 is clocked at 275 core/270 memory compared to the 325 core/310 memory of the Pro. In the end the the 9700 is just a tad slower then the 9700 pro.
The 9500 is the chip with half the memory bandwith not the 9700, the previous poster was mistaken.
As for tweaking, a lot of 9700NPs come with slower memory such as 3.3n instead of 2.8 and can't quite overclock to the pro level but they can get close, as for the core it can almost always get up there.

 

[dguy6789]

Wrong, 9700 non pro is exactly the same as the 9700 pro, except for the clocks. With a tweak program they can be over clocked to pro speeds most of the time.