R9600 Pro Ultimate opinions

[AsteralTraveler]

I did a search on that R9600 variation here, only one thread showed, and it was more centered around Vagabond's choice of motherboard/processor than the board itself. Does anybody have any experience, good or bad, with it yet? I notice it uses a heatpipe, which is 52 mm wide, so I'm concerned with fitment to my Gigabyte mobo. Here's a link to it on Sapphire's website,
and this is its pricing info on Newegg.

Someone did a review on it, comparing it to the 9600 Pro and I think the 9700, don't remember who, and I don't remember what the diff is between this and the 9600 Pro. The argument has been made about the 9500 being the better performer, which I understand, but I just feel more comfortable buying a card that will be supported well into the future, especially with ATI's drivers track record.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

AT

[Eladijaz]

Greets,
Just to clarify:-
The 9500 pro is generally a better performer than the 9600 pro but I don't think the 9500 (non-pro) is better than the 9600 (non-pro).
I doubt you need to worry too much about support for the 9500pro, to be sure Ati are more likely to be tweaking the drivers to make the 9600 pro run as well as possible, but I doubt that this will have a great impact on the good performance of the 9500 pro.
Regards,
Elad.

You can have a look here for some comparisons with the 9600 pro, the straight 9700 is not listed tho'. It may be on another of the THG reviews, have a look around that site.
http://www4.tomshardware.com/graphic...714/index.html

[Urban_Squrill]

I would just go with a 9700. But thats me and what I did. Stuipd Urban.

[AsteralTraveler]

Thanks for the input. This video card decision is beginning to become very difficult, and I'm starting to suffer from information overload from reading so many reviews. Sooner or later I just gotta jump in, right?

There's a 9700 AIW Pro, which is what I really want, on e-bay, slightly used, going for about $220. I just want to be able to prove to myself that I can build a system for under $2K, which is what I'd end up paying for a Gateway with lack-luster performance.

[poopeyhed2]

Well, all I can say is I'm very happy of purchasing the Radeon 9600 Pro, overclocks like a champ, but I think I have to "burn" it in for a little while longer at 490 core as it keeps locking up all my games at 500 MHz. As for the ram It's at 344 MHz, 44 MHz increase from stock, not bad, so far. If you want to save some money, you can get it w/o the heatpipes, and go to performance-pcs.com and buy the heatpipe there and install it yourself.

[AsteralTraveler]

How 'bout a Diamond Viper V770, with a whopping 32mb of RAM, AGP 4x?!?!?!?



Actually, I'm borrowing it from work just to hold me over. My processor will be arriving this week, and I've been DYING to turn my system on for weeks now.

Poopeyhed (lol, gotta love it!), are you using Powerstrip to OC it, or the provided utility? Is it a Sapphire? Thanks

AT

[poopeyhed2]

I purchased a BBA (Built By Ati) card, comes with the bare essentials So it comes out cheaper, I don't really want anything else besides the card . To overclock my card, I'm using the Rage 3d tweak, it's free and easy to use.

[AsteralTraveler]

Thanks again man. I've got the Rage 3D tweak bookmarked also.

Originally posted by Urban_Squrill
I would just go with a 9700. But thats me and what I did. Stuipd Urban.

A squirrel that can fly can in no way be stupid, whether he's in the city or the suburbs!!!

AT

[blubomber]

Here is a review on Sharky's about the 9600pro Ultiamte and 9800pro Ultimante.

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardwar...le.php/2245951

I personaly am planning on a purchase of the 9600 pro. It is half the price of the 9800 pro and supports the newer stuff that comes with the R350 core as apposed to the R300. Even though the 9600 pro comes with the RV350 core, i would still buy it over the 9500 pro. 10-20 fps difference between the 9500 pro and the 9600 pro is not noticable since this 9600 pro still gets very good frame rates.

[Prexaspes]

Actually, the R300 and R350 cores aren't all that different. There was a die shrink for 15 to 13 micron cores (for the 9600, anyway), allowing the R350 to clock higher, the HDL code was adjusted to optimize Hyper-Z III to enhance the Z cache for the next generation of games, and there have been improvements to the Z and color compression to improve its performance in anti-aliased modes; these are not active in non-AA modes.

The R350 core has more capability to overclock, but the R300 cores have been known to get up to 400mhz since their introduction into the market.

Based on this, I would suggest the 9500 Pro over the 9600 Pro because the 9600 Pro only has 4 pipelines running while the 9500 Pro has all eight running. It may be half the price of the 9800, but it is half the chip. The 9600 Pro has 75 million transistors while the 9500 Pro has 107 million. The 9800 Pro has 110 million, and is 15 micron like the R300 parts.

Any of them should get you high performance and good framerates.

EDIT:

I realized I forgot to mention memory architectures!

The 9500 and 9600 series cards both have 128 bit memory interfaces, while the 9700 and 9800 (except the 9800 SE, which is also 128 bit) series cards have 256 bit interfaces. 256 bit over 128 bit is a LOT of memory bandwidth.