mdzcpa
09-14-2002, 01:41 PM
First off...the card isn't mine. A close friend of mine picked this Radeon up yesterday for his sytem and we ran it through some preliminary testing at my place last night. I will not likely be doing a full review on it, so I decided to just put together a thread to share the experience regarding the installation and first impressions. I will update the thread as we tweak things along.
Anyway, here is a few shots of the how things arrived:
http://www.liquidninjas.com/mdzcpa/reviewphotos/9700/DSCN0605.JPG
http://www.liquidninjas.com/mdzcpa/reviewphotos/9700/DSCN0609.JPG
And the memory...
http://www.liquidninjas.com/mdzcpa/reviewphotos/9700/DSCN0610.JPG
And the new extra power connector...
http://www.liquidninjas.com/mdzcpa/reviewphotos/9700/DSCN0611.JPG
And a shot of the fitment in a KR7A...
http://www.liquidninjas.com/mdzcpa/reviewphotos/9700/DSCN0623.JPG
Installation was straight forward, but we did have one quirk. The extra power connector on the card which connects to a floppy power cable needs to be connected using only the cable ATI provides. This is basically a regular 4 pin molex connection extender, with a floppy power connector spliced in.
The installation instructions say to run the 4 pin molex connector of the ATI cable into an existing hard drive, and connect the floppy connector to video card. Then, of course, to hook up the ATI cable to a 4 pin connector off the PSU.
Thinking this method was just for convenience, and the fact that my buddies PSU has two floppy power connectors, we just hooked up his second floppy power connector straight to the card. This was a no go. The card did not give us the BIOS warning stating we needed to use the additional power connector (which will happen if you don't plug it in), but instead just gave us a black screen and no boot. No beep code either...just a black screen. Repeated warm or cold boots didn't help.
We took another look at the directions which showed the connection using the ATI supplied cable and how it was run to a hard drive and the card. When we did this the 9700 booted right up.:)
Wierd.....but that's the way you need it i guess.
As far as performance first impressions are concerned I must admit the card rocks....with one hitch. It does NOT like high FSB speeds (or more like AGP Bus speeds). My buddies system is comprised of:
Unlocked XP2000+
Abit KR7A-RAID
2 x 256 Crucial PC 2700
Enermax EG 465
Santa Cruz
2 HDs
CDROM & Burner
With his "old" GF3 Ti500, he ran his system at a modest 163 x 11 for a 1793mhz for 24/7 use. Rock stable. However, after installing the 9700, the best FSB we could get was about 149mhz. Above 153mhz the system would not boot with the 9700 in there. At 153mhz the card would boot and run 2d fine, but 3DMark2001 would cause the screen to go black (and the card would turn off) after a loop or two. At 149mhz the system was rock stable.
We tried everything to get the FSB up including setting the I/O voltage higher/lower, changing the AGP rate to x2 (vs x4), etc., but no go. We are quite certain that it is just the the 9700 deosn't like high FSB...at least on my buddies' system. No freezes or crashes. No artifacts. Just a black screen if you go above 150mhz.
If we had a KT333 mobo with a 1/5 divisor, this FSB limitation would still allow us to get much much higher...in the 175-185 range. But with the 1/4 divisor of the KR7A, 150mhz is where we would have to settle. So we decided to make the best of what we had and press on.
Running at 12 x 149 for a 1800mhz cpu speed, with memory at CAS 2, 4way, 2,5,2 we hit the following 3DMark2001:
http://www.liquidninjas.com/mdzcpa/reviewphotos/9700/9700stock.JPG
Not bad at all considering no overclock on the card itself, and the low FSB speed. We didn't have time to play with overclocking too much but we did tinker a little (and then ran out of time). With only a 5% overclock on the GPU and memory, another 200 points was added easily.
As far as stability and compatability is concerned, we were quite happy. We loaded the official ATI D3D patch which just came out for the 9700 before testing the games. We are pleased to say that every game we tested we had success with:
SOF II
Battlefield 1942
Warcraft III
RTCW
No artifacts...no glitches...no problems. Running the card at AA x8, and antistropic filtering x6 the image was crisp and clear and still produced phenominal frame rates.
One other point,,,there is some discussion on Rage3D about a cold boot issue with the KR7A and the 9700. It is reported that with the 9700 and the KR7A warm reboots work fine, but no cold boot. There were a handful of these reports. We are happy to say that we did not experience this trouble at all.
So first impressions say thumbs up:) I'm not sure if the FSB limit issue will be widespread, or it is just our "early" card. But, if it does prove to be the case, this might make some extreme overclockers hesitate. For anyone with 1/5 or 1/6 divisors this will not be as much of an issue and it will certainly improve the benches. With the extra bandwidth of getting the memory up closer to 200mhz I'm sure there are some easy 15000+ 3DMark2001 scores there even for the modest overclocker.
Well...that's all for now:)
Anyway, here is a few shots of the how things arrived:
http://www.liquidninjas.com/mdzcpa/reviewphotos/9700/DSCN0605.JPG
http://www.liquidninjas.com/mdzcpa/reviewphotos/9700/DSCN0609.JPG
And the memory...
http://www.liquidninjas.com/mdzcpa/reviewphotos/9700/DSCN0610.JPG
And the new extra power connector...
http://www.liquidninjas.com/mdzcpa/reviewphotos/9700/DSCN0611.JPG
And a shot of the fitment in a KR7A...
http://www.liquidninjas.com/mdzcpa/reviewphotos/9700/DSCN0623.JPG
Installation was straight forward, but we did have one quirk. The extra power connector on the card which connects to a floppy power cable needs to be connected using only the cable ATI provides. This is basically a regular 4 pin molex connection extender, with a floppy power connector spliced in.
The installation instructions say to run the 4 pin molex connector of the ATI cable into an existing hard drive, and connect the floppy connector to video card. Then, of course, to hook up the ATI cable to a 4 pin connector off the PSU.
Thinking this method was just for convenience, and the fact that my buddies PSU has two floppy power connectors, we just hooked up his second floppy power connector straight to the card. This was a no go. The card did not give us the BIOS warning stating we needed to use the additional power connector (which will happen if you don't plug it in), but instead just gave us a black screen and no boot. No beep code either...just a black screen. Repeated warm or cold boots didn't help.
We took another look at the directions which showed the connection using the ATI supplied cable and how it was run to a hard drive and the card. When we did this the 9700 booted right up.:)
Wierd.....but that's the way you need it i guess.
As far as performance first impressions are concerned I must admit the card rocks....with one hitch. It does NOT like high FSB speeds (or more like AGP Bus speeds). My buddies system is comprised of:
Unlocked XP2000+
Abit KR7A-RAID
2 x 256 Crucial PC 2700
Enermax EG 465
Santa Cruz
2 HDs
CDROM & Burner
With his "old" GF3 Ti500, he ran his system at a modest 163 x 11 for a 1793mhz for 24/7 use. Rock stable. However, after installing the 9700, the best FSB we could get was about 149mhz. Above 153mhz the system would not boot with the 9700 in there. At 153mhz the card would boot and run 2d fine, but 3DMark2001 would cause the screen to go black (and the card would turn off) after a loop or two. At 149mhz the system was rock stable.
We tried everything to get the FSB up including setting the I/O voltage higher/lower, changing the AGP rate to x2 (vs x4), etc., but no go. We are quite certain that it is just the the 9700 deosn't like high FSB...at least on my buddies' system. No freezes or crashes. No artifacts. Just a black screen if you go above 150mhz.
If we had a KT333 mobo with a 1/5 divisor, this FSB limitation would still allow us to get much much higher...in the 175-185 range. But with the 1/4 divisor of the KR7A, 150mhz is where we would have to settle. So we decided to make the best of what we had and press on.
Running at 12 x 149 for a 1800mhz cpu speed, with memory at CAS 2, 4way, 2,5,2 we hit the following 3DMark2001:
http://www.liquidninjas.com/mdzcpa/reviewphotos/9700/9700stock.JPG
Not bad at all considering no overclock on the card itself, and the low FSB speed. We didn't have time to play with overclocking too much but we did tinker a little (and then ran out of time). With only a 5% overclock on the GPU and memory, another 200 points was added easily.
As far as stability and compatability is concerned, we were quite happy. We loaded the official ATI D3D patch which just came out for the 9700 before testing the games. We are pleased to say that every game we tested we had success with:
SOF II
Battlefield 1942
Warcraft III
RTCW
No artifacts...no glitches...no problems. Running the card at AA x8, and antistropic filtering x6 the image was crisp and clear and still produced phenominal frame rates.
One other point,,,there is some discussion on Rage3D about a cold boot issue with the KR7A and the 9700. It is reported that with the 9700 and the KR7A warm reboots work fine, but no cold boot. There were a handful of these reports. We are happy to say that we did not experience this trouble at all.
So first impressions say thumbs up:) I'm not sure if the FSB limit issue will be widespread, or it is just our "early" card. But, if it does prove to be the case, this might make some extreme overclockers hesitate. For anyone with 1/5 or 1/6 divisors this will not be as much of an issue and it will certainly improve the benches. With the extra bandwidth of getting the memory up closer to 200mhz I'm sure there are some easy 15000+ 3DMark2001 scores there even for the modest overclocker.
Well...that's all for now:)