Toms got a full review

[Boomslang]

ATI 9700 pro retail right here 374.00 free shipping. Spade said compusa will have them for 350 + tax= 372.75


http://www.enpc.com/cgi-bin/enpc/ATIR9700BOX.html

[Spade]

Thats a fact!  He said they should have them by the end of this month.

[Boomslang]

This dude is smoken with 9700



http://www.pcstats.com/news.cfm#Link24828

[ZWarrior]

That is still a little high, and I have heard people say that the look of the ATI drivers isn't as good as the nVidia drivers.

[Boomslang]

I have heard people say that the ZW man  isn't as good as the rest of the clan.
But you know me I don't listen to them.
PS all the reviews I have read say the DX 9.1 drivers are the best the have seen from ATI. Thats not to say that nv drivers aren't better but we don't know that because nv30 won't be out till late Nov. and nobody has one to test. That also give ati 3mo. to improve on what they have. The newest driver that came out last weak reviewers said they had a 20-50% increase in their games. Now for me I took a hit so I went back to the old drivers.But they were for xp sp1 update. We all Know about that. A old nv 4600 is 300 now thats high!
"No brag just fact"

[Morpheus]

I think I'll have to wait for a price drop, can't justify that much cash.

Of course, you don't have to have the fastest graphics to win, it takes skill to.

[ZWarrior]

I play with a GF2MX, and I smoke most peeps.  So that proves your statement Morph.
  Wolvy said he doesn't know how I can even play with the performance I have.  I tell him it's all in the skill.

[Boomslang]

Toms got a full updated review  so  heres some tid bits:

In FSAA, ATi's Radeon easily shows the competition who's boss. Its FSAA performance is practically twice that of the GeForce4 Ti4600 across the board. Even with 2X FSAA enabled, it is usually faster than the NVIDIA board without FSAA.
The Radeon 9700 PRO proved to be superior in all possible categories, be it the framerate while the game was in progress, the triangle throughput, FSAA, anisotropic filtering, or pixel and vertex shader performance. NVIDIA's flagship trails the new champion in every discipline.

ATi is also making preparations, though, and the next performance update in the form of DDR-II memory is already on track for the end of this year. The pared-down Radeon 9500 will put additional pressure on NVIDIA in the mid to low range market. On the whole, ATi's chances for success don't look bad at all. And the real winners of this performance revolution are the consumers. After all, the most important factor in deciding which product to buy is still price, not performance. Thanks to the ongoing and bloody feud between the big boys of computer graphics, we can expect prices to continue dropping. Whoever said it was right: "A revolution every now and then is a very healthy thing."

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q3/020819/index.html

:hotbouns:Smoken the 4600

[Boomslang]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1683

another reveiw this has bench marks usen UT 2003 looks like some of the clan is going to have to get a new video card



Final Words
It has definitely been a while since we've been able to say that an ATI card has lived up to its expectations, but the Radeon 9700 Pro does live up to every last one of our expectations. The question truly ends up being, does it meet your expectations?

There are three things that the Radeon 9700 Pro can offer at this point:

1) The highest performance in current and future games.
2) The ability to play at 1600x1200 in just about any game currently available or soon to be made available, and
3) The ability to play virtually any game at 1024x768 with 4X AA and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled at smooth frame rates.

The first point is moot because you should never buy a video card based on the performance it will offer in games that are no where near being released. While it is true that the Radeon 9700 Pro is probably the best card out right now for Doom III, there will be something faster and cheaper closer to the time Doom III is released. But if you're looking to play anything this fall (UT2003, etc...) then the 9700 Pro makes a lot of sense.

The last two points will really determine whether the Radeon 9700 Pro is the card for you; if either of those options appeal to you, then the Radeon 9700 Pro is probably very well suited for your needs.

[Morpheus]

The good news is that other prices will drop as a result.

[Boomslang]

A must read for u sub 2.0


http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MzQwLDY=

And speaking more on frame rate and eye candy, I think it is worth it to bring up the AthlonXP 1.53GHz frame rates as well. The scores we got out of that setup simply floored me. I would have not guessed that a Radeon 9700 Pro upgrade could be worth so much on a sub-2GHz system. I can already see a lot of folks going for the video card upgrade with the 9700 and leaving the CPU till later as we start banking on 333MHz bus AthlonXPs showing up.