I can't believe it's not nVidia (updated)

The System

The system in which I put my Radeon 9700 Pro I built from scratch, so no drivers had to be uninstalled or hardware removed and replaced. It is an Intel P4 2.4Ghz, on a Soyo 4x400 Dragon Ultra motherboard with 1GB of DDR333 2700 RAM, a Radeon 9700 Pro. It has a 300W Antec power supply.

The Card

I must confess I was a little worried after purchasing the Radeon. Every site review I had read had been excellent, giving the card high praise. That was until I came across Epinions. These were reviews from real people who had tried the card, and couldn’t get it to work or got it working, but with serious problems. Fortunately, I have had no problems at all as of yet, and I couldn’t be more relived.

The Installation

Installation was a breeze. The card fits snugly in the AGP slot, requiring a minimal amount of insertion force. The Radeon does require addition power, which it gets via a pass-through cable to your hard drive. The card is not directly connected to your hard drive, nor does is have anything to do with your hard drive, aside from using the same power cable. After installing the card I installed the drivers from the CD, and then promptly downloaded and installed the latest drivers from ATI’s website.

The Performance

I’ll have to say I was impressed. I had read that the card was amazing, but I couldn’t imagine it running things smoothly at the resolutions I had read about, such as Jedi Knight II at 1600x1200 running at 116FPS. I decided to put it to the test. I loaded up JKII and turned all the settings all the way up and turned the resolution to 1600x1200x32. It ran as smooth as silk. I also tested some other graphically intense games (using both D3D and OpenGL, when available) with all the settings turned up, such as Hitman 2, Medal of Honor, and the Spliter Cell demo. All preformed amazingly. To finalize everything I downloaded and installed 3Dmark 2001SE. I ran the benchmark. I scored 11909 3Dmarks. In other words: mad fast. I also tested the card out on some 2D games to make sure all was well in that department. Since one of ATI’s strong points has always been 2D,everything ran smoothly. Drivers are excellent. No Problems there.

Update 5/26/03
I’ve had the Radeon 9700 for four months now, and my computer has been on for pretty much every day of those four months...still no problems and ATI continues to rapidly update their drivers. I couldn’t be happier with the performance I am getting out of the card. Haven’t had any trouble with drivers since Catalyst 3.0, which were a little glitchy, but now I’m using 3.4 which work beautifully (and provide a 30% performance boost in certain areas).

I’ve been playing a lot of older non-3D games recently and without incident. I would still recommend this card to anyone who wants a blazing fast card and excellent image quality. I wish I had something bad to say about the card, but I don’t. I leave my computer running for days at a time, and it’s never overheated. The whole faulty heat shim debate is a non-issue if you leave the card at it’s default settings and don’t try to overclock it. If you know what you are doing, and know how to install hardware you shouldn’t have any trouble with this card.

I have no affinity to ATI, if nVidia had made a faster card I would have bought that. My last card was a nVidia and I got a lot of use out of it. I simply go for the quality, and ATI won out this time. If nVidia’s next line is better I’ll go to them.