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Get 9700 pro for 30 bucks?

W

Wariogiant

Member
My neighbor is offering me a deal for the card and is coming over soon to see how it runs. I got a really low score on 3dmark 2005, around 1475. I currently have a Radeon 9600XT and was wondering whether the performance gain would be worth it.

My specs are: AMD Athlon XP 2600+, Radeon 9600 XT, Crucial 512mb, Samsung 710t Monitor, Asus A7V333, and Maxtor 40GB hardrive.
 
You even have to ask? 😛 The only consideration is if you have a quality ~300W PSU. Otherwise, a 9700P will be faster than your 9600XT in every case.
 
Yeah, definitey go for it. It will be worth your while, especially if you play games with AA and AF on. The extra memory bandwidth will definitely yield an improvement from what you currently have.
 
There shouldn't be a lot of difference between a 9600XT and a 9700 Pro, although the 9700 Pro is the better card.

I scored a 1633 under 3DMark05 with my old Athlon XP 2400+, Radeon 9700 (non-Pro), and 1Gb of PC2100 DDR 266 RAM. I would expect your 2600+ and Radeon 9600XT to be about equal. I can't imagine there's that big of a difference between 512Mb and 1Gb of RAM.

You might want to go into your video settings and make sure Anti-aliasing and Ansiotropic Filtering are both turned off completely. I normally leave my AA at 4X and my AF at 8X and it dropped my 3DMark05 scores to about 914 or so.

If you really want to jump up your video performance, you might want to keep your $30 and save toward a GF6600GT AGP card. Still, for $30 the 9700 Pro is a nice buy. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts your neighbor offered it to you because he's going to spend your $30 on a 6600 or 6800-series AGP card.
 
Although synthetic benches like 3dmark05 arent always a good indicator of real world performance, I will have to say that crazyeddie has a point. 9700Pro is a good card. It was a lot faster than 9600xt in DX8.1 games. With DX9 games though, 9700Pro is just as slow as 9600xt. It might offer you the ability to play at slightly higher settings, but nothign that will satisfy a person who plays often and expect smooth frames. Just check out TomsVGA Charts 4 and u'll see 9700Pro struggles beyond 1024x768 with quality settings in any new game. Still for $30 it's a better card than 9600xt. I'd get it. You could always resell it or the 9600xt for higher than $30.
 
Originally posted by: RussianSensation
Although synthetic benches like 3dmark05 arent always a good indicator of real world performance, I will have to say that crazyeddie has a point. 9700Pro is a good card. It was a lot faster than 9600xt in DX8.1 games. With DX9 games though, 9700Pro is just as slow as 9600xt. It might offer you the ability to play at slightly higher settings, but nothign that will satisfy a person who plays often and expect smooth frames. Just check out TomsVGA Charts 4 and u'll see 9700Pro struggles beyond 1024x768 with quality settings in any new game. Still for $30 it's a better card than 9600xt. I'd get it. You could always resell it or the 9600xt for higher than $30.
Click to expand...

Let's see, you joined AT without reading any of the articles!? Did you even read HL-2 week? The Radeon 9700Pro scored 89 FPS in "battle in the canal" at 1024x786 in High Quality mode.
 
Originally posted by: Wariogiant
My neighbor is offering me a deal for the card and is coming over soon to see how it runs. I got a really low score on 3dmark 2005, around 1475. I currently have a Radeon 9600XT and was wondering whether the performance gain would be worth it.

My specs are: AMD Athlon XP 2600+, Radeon 9600 XT, Crucial 512mb, Samsung 710t Monitor, Asus A7V333, and Maxtor 40GB hardrive.
Click to expand...

I'd be all over that deal.
 
BFG10K is right. The 9600XT has only 4 pipes but clocked at 500Mhz for a fill-rate of 2 Gigapixels/second while the 9700 Pro has 8 pipes clocked at 325MHz for a fill-rate of 2.6 Gigapixels/second so the 9700 Pro is 30% faster there. Also, the 8600XT only has memory bandwidth of 9.6 Gigabytes/second (via a 128-bit bus) whilst the 9700 Pro has 19.8 Gigabytes/second of memory bandwidth (via a 256-bit bus). $30? Grab it while you can!🙂
 
no!! im jk ..sell both your cards and get something even better. NEVERMMIND ihave no clue what im talkinabout sorry
 
Originally posted by: ScrewFace
BFG10K is right. The 9600XT has only 4 pipes but clocked at 500Mhz for a fill-rate of 2 Gigapixels/second while the 9700 Pro has 8 pipes clocked at 325MHz for a fill-rate of 2.6 Gigapixels/second so the 9700 Pro is 30% faster there. Also, the 8600XT only has memory bandwidth of 9.6 Gigabytes/second (via a 128-bit bus) whilst the 9700 Pro has 19.8 Gigabytes/second of memory bandwidth (via a 256-bit bus). $30? Grab it while you can!🙂
Click to expand...


whats a 8600xt
 
Although synthetic benches like 3dmark05 arent always a good indicator of real world performance, I will have to say that crazyeddie has a point. 9700Pro is a good card. It was a lot faster than 9600xt in DX8.1 games. With DX9 games though, 9700Pro is just as slow as 9600xt. It might offer you the ability to play at slightly higher settings, but nothign that will satisfy a person who plays often and expect smooth frames. Just check out TomsVGA Charts 4 and u'll see 9700Pro struggles beyond 1024x768 with quality settings in any new game. Still for $30 it's a better card than 9600xt. I'd get it. You could always resell it or the 9600xt for higher than $30.
Click to expand...

That was funny :roll:

Well, won't even bother.

Buy that thing, in real world will almost double the 9600XT in performance, specially at high res or with AA/AF turned on 😉
 
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