Introduction

ATI’s new flagship

It has been just over two months since we brought you our initial preview of the RADEON 9700 PRO with benchmarks, as you can imagine quite a few developments have occurred since then.

Most importantly, RADEON 9700 PRO boards have hit retail shelves. Some of you reading this article may already have your RADEON 9700 PRO, or perhaps it’s on the way. In fact, not only are ATI RADEON 9700 PRO boards hitting stores, third-party manufacturers boards are also available. We’ll be bringing you reviews of these boards in the coming weeks.

However, the key reason we held off on reviewing the RADEON 9700 PRO back in August was because we wanted to test the board under multiple system configurations. Back in August AGP 8x platforms weren’t available to test the RADEON 9700 PRO’s prowess and compatibility, now we’ve got AGP 8x platforms based on chipsets from VIA and SiS, with Intel’s AGP 8x chipset “Granite Bay” on the brink of release. We also wanted to test the RADEON 9700 PRO extensively on the Athlon platform. We explored this aspect last month when we tested the RADEON 9700 PRO on Athlon and Athlon XP processors ranging from 1-2GHz.

Now that we’ve spent more time with the RADEON 9700 PRO, we feel it’s time to address all of these topics and more in an official review. Lets get started.

ATI RADEON 9700 PRO card

The back of the 9700 PRO

First, we’ve already covered the features of the RADEON 9700 PRO core in greater detail in our preview article, so if you’d like to read up on what makes it so special, please refer back to that article as we devoted a considerable amount of time to that topic. We’ll still go over the features in this article as well but we’d rather devote more time to the RADEON 9700 PRO experience itself, rather than discuss specs.