Radeon 9500 Pro rumour?

[Daylen]

Hello

A bloke that I'm studying with says that ATI Radeon 9500 Pros ARE Radeon 9700 Pros that did not pass "quality control" tests (or something like that) and as a result of this when the 9500 Pro gets warm there can be anomolies in the picture.

Is this true or is he talking a load of trash?

Thank you

 

[Daylen]

Anyone?

 

[godmare]

Load a' trash, and tell him so:
Anandtech

The first question to ask about the Radeon 9500 Pro is how does it differ from the Radeon 9700 Pro?
The Radeon 9500 Pro uses the same R300 GPU but with a one noteworthy modification:
The Radeon 9500 Pro has two 64-bit DDR memory controllers instead of the four in the Radeon 9700 Pro. This cuts the 9500 Pro's memory bandwidth to half of the 9700 Pro at identical clock speeds, and puts it in line with the GeForce4's 128-bit DDR memory subsystem.

 

[FearoftheNight]

Probably normal r9500s are since some of they were converted. But 9500 pros? nah.

 

[VirginiaDonkey]

The 9500 NON-pros with the "L" shaped memory are the same as 9700's with 4 pipelines disabled

 

[Blastman]

It is possible that the R300 GPU?s are ? ?binned? ? at the factory, ie. - tested and sorted according to how fast they are capable of running. Fastest binned cores would go into 9800, 9700pro, 9700 and so on down to the slowest cores would go for the 9500?s. This would explain why a 9500 pro core overclocks to only about 350mhz while the 9800 is already 380mhz from the factory and HardOCP got their 9800 overclocked to 450.

EDIT: 9800 is actually a R350 core, but you get the idea.