Creative 3D Blaster 5 RX9700 Review

[Technonut]

Here.

Creative has a very interesting history with graphics cards. Its the only company we know of that has produced graphics cards based on 3DFX, S3, nVidia and ATI technologies. Whats even more interesting is that earlier this year, Creative acquired 3D Labs meaning we shall be looking at Creative's "in-house" graphics cards soon. Now that does raise an interesting point- why would Creative chose to release a Radeon 9700 Pro based card when they're expecting their own 3D Labs solution pretty soon. We dont have an answer for that yet, however, we do have Creative's Radeon 9700 Pro based card- the 3D Labs Blaster 5 RX9700 in out hands today.

 

[Technonut]

Bump for the afternoon crowd. Any thoughts?

 

[Markfw]

When I try the link, it starts to load some page OK, but then I get "The requested URL /reviews/imgs/indextools.js was not found on this server." and a white screen.

 

[Daovonnaex]

The fact that it has 2.8ns BGA memory, ramsinks, and a beefy hsf is attractive. It's a shame that CL only sells its Radeon cards in Asia.

 

[Technonut]

The fact that it has 2.8ns BGA memory, ramsinks, and a beefy hsf is attractive. It's a shame that CL only sells its Radeon cards in Asia.

Is this true? I was seriously considering this card over the ATI Retail version. From the review:

There's no denying that the Radeon 9700 is the fastest GPU available today and Creative does good by moving fast- we're told that retail cards will hit the shelves within a couple of weeks.

EDIT:

When I try the link, it starts to load some page OK, but then I get "The requested URL /reviews/imgs/indextools.js was not found on this server." and a white screen.

Anyone else having trouble with the link?

 

[Dug]

No trouble with the link. I looks like the performance from o/cing doesn't effect it that much. (wouldn't be noticable anyway). Which I like. Looks nice, but I'm wondering what the street price of this will be.

 

[bigboxes]

Read the link earlier on the sapphire thread, but I am noticing the same thing as Dug; the fact that it doesn't perform that much better o/c. It seemed to me that in anand's review of the Gigabyte 9700, that the ATI card outperformed the OEM manufacturer stock and o/c version. I wish this review would have done the same type of comparison and showed an ATI card vs. the Creative card side by side. And yes, it (the creative card) does look pretty!

~box

 

[CrazySaint]

Originally posted by: Dug
No trouble with the link. I looks like the performance from o/cing doesn't effect it that much. (wouldn't be noticable anyway). Which I like. Looks nice, but I'm wondering what the street price of this will be.

They increases the clock speed by 10% and the performance went up about 10% in the non CPU bound benchmarks, sounds about right to me.

 

[GTaudiophile]

The link doesn't work for me. Could it be suffering from the "Anandtech effect?"