Good for the money.

I got my 9700 Pro for my birthday. I immediately put it in my Pentium 3 system (800Mhz P3 Coppermine on an FIC FA-11), replacing my older ATI Radeon 7200 with it. I hooked up the floppy power connector, and turned on my computer.

Windows 98SE loaded, and i installed the retail drivers without a hitch. However, with all video cards, I recommend that you download and install the new drivers first (after a reformat, I install NIC drivers first so I can download the latest video drivers). My 3dmark 2001 score raised 4000 points from the switch. Not very bad at all.

Games run very nicely with this card, it is very powerful and can run detailed and somewhat-inefficient games (rendering-wise) like Morrowind with 4x Antialiasing without much of a performance drop. One thing I did notice, however, is that this card tended to cause just a tiny bit more z-buffer artifacts ("clipping" I guess its called) than my Radeon 7200, but this should probably be fixed by new drivers and game patches. However, there *is* a bit of a problem with SimCity 4, it does run very slow on systems with ATI video cards in general, and I urge that that one download the patch if they get SC4. You can run many games at 4xAA nicely, and performance can be increased even more (if you're confident in yourself) by using a tweaker tool, like Rage3dTweak (And I know there are others, but I can't remember their names).

Cooling *is* a bit of an issue, however I have yet to experience any instabilities with my card. The RAM chips do get warm to the touch (not hot), but that can always be fixed with RAM sinks, or by buying a non-ATI 9700 (Tyan Tachyon version comes to mind). But I think that as long as your case has pretty good airflow, you should be fine. And remember, this is a pretty fast card. The GPU has more transistors than many of your CPUs, so its bound to put out a bit of heat. Actually, with the stock heatsink on, the GPU is usually a around 58C, which is about the same as an overclocked Athlon XP without a Delta screamer fan on it. And the GeForceFX and its big cooling unit didn't really do much better.

Christmas I got more modern hardware (Athlon XP 2400+, new mobo and memory) and I'm still using a 300W PSU, and the card still runs great, despite the increased power demand on the PSU. The only reason this card needs the connector is because the AGP slot alone cannot supply enough power, and do remember, the nVidia GeForce FX cards have one as well.

Some people say that the card didn't work with their system, but is it the card's fault? In many cases, its also a problem with the motherboard or a previous video card driver. Just because your motherboard says that it is AGP8x, doesnt mean that it is AGP8x. One example that I can think of (I'm an AMD man, so I know more about AMD systems than P4 systems) is the VIA KT400 chipset. It supports AGP8x, but has problems with AGP 8x cards. This should be fixed in KT400a. nVidia's nForce2 chipset, however, works great with the card. And be sure to completely uninstall your previous card's drivers before installing this card and loading its drivers.

And one more thing. If your card does have problems, and its an ATI card covered by the warranty, try RMAing it. There is a so-called "newer revision" that you get if you RMA it. The newer revision doesn't have those black objects with copper wire wrapped around them on the card (located near the top).