Anand's retail Radeon 9500 Pro review - much faster!!!....
- Thread starter martrox
- Start date
Richthofen
Newcomer
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As most of us thought, the 9500Pro is going to be a super deal....at $199.95 it's a steal. It's very competitive with the TI4600 for less money, as many thought it would be. And by Feb probably can be had for less than $150.00!
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Well but in the end thats bad for ATI. I don't see any possibility to earn money with a product like that for such a low price.
The GF4Ti4600 costs a lot less in production and that includes chip and board.
Such a low price indicates that until now ATIs market situation did not improve at all. Reports that they again lost market share indicated that already.
I am not that optimistic for them anymore. To much wasted time already. I don't think they will have that much time again.
Once you wake up the big guy it gets a lot more difficicult. Just look at AMD vs Intel.
As most of us thought, the 9500Pro is going to be a super deal....at $199.95 it's a steal. It's very competitive with the TI4600 for less money, as many thought it would be. And by Feb probably can be had for less than $150.00!
"
Well but in the end thats bad for ATI. I don't see any possibility to earn money with a product like that for such a low price.
The GF4Ti4600 costs a lot less in production and that includes chip and board.
Such a low price indicates that until now ATIs market situation did not improve at all. Reports that they again lost market share indicated that already.
I am not that optimistic for them anymore. To much wasted time already. I don't think they will have that much time again.
Once you wake up the big guy it gets a lot more difficicult. Just look at AMD vs Intel.
Dio said:
About as well as people saying that the NV30 couldn't be sold for $300. (Which is to say its pure speculation)
But on a more serious note, if they can get the price down to $150 in the stores, it will certainly spur on add-on sales and put NVIDIA vendors in a world of hurt without a similarly competing product.
Conclusion drawn mostly because I won't buy one until its $150 or less.
I glanced at Anand's test setup and it appears he was using Catalyst 2.3 drivers for 9700 PRO. I don't know if he doesn't realise the 2.4 drivers work on 9700 PRO or if he was just recycling results.
Our review uses the 2.4 (7.79) for all boards -- these are currently the official WHQL set available for download off the ATI site.
Our review uses the 2.4 (7.79) for all boards -- these are currently the official WHQL set available for download off the ATI site.
Could we please leave the recriminations off this forum?
Thech Report has an excellent review out now:
http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002q4/radeon-9500pro/index.x?pg=1
Here's the gist of it:
http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002q4/radeon-9500pro/index.x?pg=1
Here's the gist of it:
JF_Aidan_Pryde
Regular
It took 3 Radeons to get it right, but it's nice to see they made it. I feel good for ATI. I bet they must be pretty darn happy inside. NVIDIA, time to get start kick'in!
Joe DeFuria
Legend
Where do you get this information from? I would agree that the R9500 Pro chip probably costs a bit more than the 4600. But the board? Looks to me like th 4600's PCB is more complex than the "new" 9500 Pro's...and the 4600 is paired with faster memory to boot.
Obviously, ATI is getting very good yields on the R-300 chip at 275 Mhz....simply by virture of the fact they can MSRP it in the sub $200 category with the 9500/9500 Pro. What are the yields on the GeForce4 Ti part at 4600 speeds? I do doubt that the R-300 chip is chearper than the GeForce4 Ti 4600...but the 9500 Pro board level product? Not so sure...
R9500 is an exellent product, there is simply no doubt about that!
I mean, think of it for a sec, DX9 hasn't even been released yet, and mainstream (<200$) cards are already on the market! I really hope NVIDIA will catch up to ATI here soon enough and bring a similarly perfoming card to the market, so the developers could focus on DX9 class hardware immediately! Add to that the significance of HLSL's and I can only hope developers would follow the path laid down for them!
I mean, think of it for a sec, DX9 hasn't even been released yet, and mainstream (<200$) cards are already on the market! I really hope NVIDIA will catch up to ATI here soon enough and bring a similarly perfoming card to the market, so the developers could focus on DX9 class hardware immediately! Add to that the significance of HLSL's and I can only hope developers would follow the path laid down for them!
Board costs are negligable, and the item that drives the cost is the number of layers and size of the board. The 4600 board appears approximately 10% higher. The number of traces or vias drilled have almost no bearing on the final cost. But even then, the board is <10$ of the cost, so even a 50% variation wouldn't make much difference in the ability to sell the product at a given price point.Joe DeFuria said:
The number of discretes is approximately the same on both boards, but those costs are completely negligable. The large caps are maybe $.25 in volume, the smaller ones and resistors are less than a penny.
The supporting ICs may or may not be a factor (I don't know what all of them they are), though the 9500 appears to have a few more. Only about 2 amongst the bunch look like they cost much at all (the rest appear to be DCDCs, linear regs, etc)
The heatsink costs are out of my realm of knowledge.
Hopefully we can lay to rest the good board/bad board/expensive board arguments. The board's effect on the final retail price is pretty negligable.