HardOCP's 9700 preview - a case of thermal throttling?

[MadRat]

If Kyle had his "unreleased version of Thoroughbred" Athlon XP at 165fsb then the AGP should have been 83MHz and his PCI at 41MHz. The 9700 may have simply been running too hot for the tests and reverted to a slower speed to compensate. It doesn't make alot of sense that a 2.5GHz Athlon XP would run slower clock for clock to a Pentium4-2.53GHz, regardless of the optimizations of the 9700's drivers. Alot of the performance difference should lay in the DirectX optimizations that benefit both platforms, not so much driver optimizations like the results implied. Thermal overload could have kicked in some type of throttling that cut the 9700's performance by a large fraction, which would account for the differences.

 

[Adul]

to bad it wasnt run on a stock athlon XP 2600 or 2800