PowerColor Evil Commando 2 Gold Radeon 9700 128MB Review

[Dave Baumann]

http://www.beyond3d.com/siteimages/b3dsmall.gif (http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/powercolor/radeon9700/)Its been a while not since R300 was introduced, and Beyond3D has had the opportunity to review numerous board incarnations of ATI’s latest 3D chip. However, one remained un-reviewed, until now. Courtesy of PowerColor we are looking at their ‘Evil Commando 2 Gold’ Radeon 9700 128MB.<blockquote>"Those who are not familiar with the Radeon 9700 will want to know that this board variant remains exactly the same as Radeon 9700 PRO in all respects other than the clock speeds of the core and memory. This means that all 8 pixel pipelines available from R300 are there, as is the full 256-bit memory bus. All that's different is that where Radeon 9700 PRO has core/memory speeds of 325/610MHz, Radeon 9700 weighs in at 275/540MHz. This still equates to a theoretical pixel rate of 2.2G pixels/s and a physical bandwidth of just over 17 GB/s."</blockquote>We'll compare the performance of this board with two of its siblings, the higher powered Radeon 9700 PRO and the lower bandwidthed 9500 PRO, to see exactly where the 9700 stands in the lineup.

Read the full review here (http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/powercolor/radeon9700/).

[Pete]

Thanks, Dave. Fortuitous timing--I was just considering buying a 9500 to convert to a 9700, and was about to go looking for reviews detailing the performance difference between a 9500P and a 9700. :)

The editor in me wants to point out what you meant to say on page 10: This requires plenty of bandwidth, which is why the 9700 remains much closer to the 9700 PRO than the 9500 PRO does to the 9700.

And this first page paragraph seems out of place, considering you don't show any pics of the 9500: As we can see, the Sapphire ATLANTIS 9500 board is more or less the same same as the ATI board, even down to the heat-sink and heat-sink label. It would appear that this may have been purchased from ATI as an entire board, however at is no bad thing as at least the quality of the board is assured.

[Himself]

"All that's different is that where Radeon 9700 PRO has core/memory speeds of 325/610MHz,"


It's 325/310 which would make that 325/620 and lose the MHz :P

[Nagorak]

In the comparison chart the R9500 Pro's memory bandwidth is quoted as being "8.6 GB/s", while the R9700's is quoted as being "17.6 GB/s". However, they're both running at the same memory speed, just one with a 256 bit bus. Therefore the R9700 should have exactly twice the bandwidth of the R9500 Pro, but 8.6*2=17.2, not 17.6. :shock:

"The Flyby benchmark has usually shown itself to be largely dependant on fill-rate, and bandwidth and fill-rate usually goes hand-in-hand."

This is a kind of awkward passage, you might want to change it to:

The Flyby benchmark has usually shown itself to be largely dependant on fill-rate which usually goes hand-in-hand with bandwidth.

[Anonymous]

Any thoughts on the quality of PowerColor Radeon 9500/9700 boards? I mean image quality, fan noise, overclockability, memory brand and rating, etc.

PowerColor boards are cheaper than Hercules and Saphire boards, but are they any good?

[stevem]

PowerColor quality is quite good. 9700s should be OK. The samples I have use Samsung DDR. I recently picked up a 7500 for a low powered PC (for DVD playback) &amp; performance is OK given the low price. The 2D IQ wasn't as good as I'd have liked. It has Miro DDR.