The
All-In Wonder 9700 Pro
As
with all their products, the AiW 9700 Pro ships in ATi's red and
black box. If you've never owned an AiW product, one thing you'll
notice right away is the weight of the package. Being their flagship
video card, they pack a lot of goodies, including cables, manuals,
CDs, a breakout box, a remote and the AiW 9700 Pro itself.
The
AiW 9700 Pro is a full sized AGP card, though no larger than the
desktop Radeon 9700 Pro. There isn't any extraordinary cooling,
or extra large PCB, so you shouldn't have any physical issues
with installation.
The
heatsink design is similar to that of the Radeon 9700 Pro, although
it has been slightly modified to fit into the board layout. This
HSF cools the R300 GPU, clocked at 325MHz. There are also a couple
more heatsinks near the capacitor. I guess there's no such thing
as not enough cooling.
There
are 128MBs of 2.8ns BGA chips are manufactured by Samsung, and
clocked at 310MHz (620MHz DDR). The BGA ram has no cooling whatsoever
though, so this will likely hinder overclocking a little.
Like
all the Radeon cards above 9500, you will need to plug in the
power cable to provide the extra juice to the AiW 9700 Pro. ATi
suggest a 300W PSU, but as we like to tell our readers, more is
better, and don't forget quality is important.
There
are plenty of I/O connections on the AiW 9700 Pro. What gets used
will depend on how you plan to setup your PC. There is no standard
15-pin VGA connection, but there is a DVI-VGA adapter included.
Keep in mind that there is no dual screen support. You can only
have one DVI-LCD or VGA connection at any one time.
The
R300
I'm
not going to dig in to deeply into the R300 core, but feel free
to go over our Radeon 9700 Pro review. There are a few items that
I feel are worth re-mentioning though.
The
R300 is based on the mature 0.15u manufacturing process. There
is an 8 pixel and 4 vertex pipeline, but it is limited to one
texture per pipeline. The Pro version of the R300 is clocked at
325MHz, though it is entirely possible that OEMs, and non-Pro
models (you can bet on this) will be slower.
The
R300 supports DirectX 9.0 and AGP 8x. Though it's not like there
are any DX9 games out there, this is a forward-looking feature.
The same goes with AGP8x, as current games don't really saturate
the AGP4x bus.
Full-scene
anti-aliasing (FSAA) and anisotropic filtering is improved from
earlier versions in the form of Smoothvision 2.0. These features
are there to improve image quality in games by removing the jaggies
and the blur normally present in 3D games.
Truform
adds additional polygons that will smooth the edges of a curved
object. HyperZ III addresses the memory bandwidth issues that
plague many video cards. Videoshader is supposed help smooth out
streaming video, which tends to be blocky. The results are clearer
and smoother video.
Test
Setup
Chaintech
9EJS1 ZENITH:
Pentium 4 2.8GHz, 2 x 256MB Corsair PC3200 TWINX Ram, ATi All-In-Wonder
9700 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1,
ATi Catalyst 3.2.
The
comparison video card will be none other than the Radeon 9700
Pro. If you're looking for Ti4600 numbers for comparison, We're
sticking with the vanilla 9700 Pro for a few reasons, mainly;
we don't have anything "faster", and to do an apples
to apples comparison, since as we have seen with past All-in-Wonders,
the AiW line has always been slower than the desktop model.
The
OS setup is a fresh install, followed by the patches and service
packs. For the video card drivers, we used the default settings,
enabling AA and AF as needed.
3D
Mark 2001SE
This
marks the last time we'll be using Futuremark's 3D Mark 2001SE.
The benchmark has served us well over the past couple years, but
it is a couple years old, and todays video cards just aren't stressed
hard enough by it. We tested at a variety of resolutions, at default
settings.
3D
Mark 2001 SE, No AA, No AF
3D
Mark 2001 SE, 4xAA, No AF
Given
that both cards use the same memory and GPU, it should come as
no surprise that the scores are essentially the same. This is
a far cry from past All-in-Wonders where the cards would use the
same technology as the vanilla desktop ones, but clocked much
slower.
Given
the scores above, 3D Mark 2001's time in the sun has passed. With
4xAA, the 9700 Pro still stays above the 11 000 mark at 1024.
3D
Mark 2003
There
was a lot of controversy when Futuremark released their latest
version of 3D Mark. We here at VL prefer to place emphasis on
real-world benchmarks, but I am aware that many people still like
nice round numbers from running this benchmark.
3D
Mark 2003, No AA, No AF
3D
Mark 2003, 6xAA, 16xAF
After
a year of seeing five digits 3D Mark scores, it was quite a knock
back down to reality seeing sub-5000 scores. I tried to get 1600x1200,
6xAA and 16xAF working, but neither 9700 Pro would cooperate here.
It seems what we were constantly running out of memory, so it
looks like we'll be seeing 256MB video cards soon.
Code
Creatures
This
is a DX8 benchmark that makes good use of vertex and pixel shaders.
Given that the AiW 9700 Pro is a DX9 part, we can get an idea
of how it will handle an older video shader specification.
Code
Creatures No
AA, No AF
Code
Creatures 4xAA,
8xAF
The
AiW 9700 Pro handles the benchmark well, but we're not talking
about 100+ framerates this time around. There's a hit once we
turn on the AntiAliasing and Anisotropic Filtering, but it's at
1280 and up that we get the largest changes.
With
the synthetic benchmarks out of the way, let's look at some real-world
situations.
