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The Radeon 9700
People with "normal" sized cases will be happy to know that their shouldn't be any capacitor crunching. The Radeon 9700 is quite a bit smaller than the Ti4600, and should fit most motherboards and cases without any problems. It should be fair to note that nVidia did follow the AGP specifications in their design, but your motherboard may not have.
 
Thunbnails can be clicked to enlarge
You'll also notice the heat plate on the back of the PCB. This is to help dissapate the additional heat from the capacitors located directly opposite on the front. Speaking of the PCB, case window fans rejoice, as the Radeon 9700 ships with a nice red one.
 
The heatsink/fan combination is quite a bit larger than what shipped with the 8500. The 9700 is reported to run very warm, and a larger cooling solution was required. The core is clocked at 325MHz for our model, but you can likely expect non-Pro (or OEM) cards to be clocked a little slower. Although our sample ran stable, I was a little troubled by the heat eminating from the back of the PCB (directly behind the core). It was hot, and the good ole finger test* lasted about 5 seconds. (* Placing the finger on the PCB behind the core. The hotter the PCB, the less time the finger stays on it).
 
ATi supplies a power extension cable to split power from your power supply to your video card. Yes folks, you read it right. The Radeon 9700 needs extra juice. This shouldn't be an issue for most of you, but ATi suggests a beefy PSU 300W and up.
What is becoming common place now, the Radeon 9700 ships with the BGA ram. Like the GeForce 4 Ti4600s we've tested, the ram is manufactured by Samsung. Our card was clocked at 310MHz (620MHz DDR), and the ram uses 2.8ns BGA chips.
Theoretically, this should allow the ram to run at 357MHz, so the 310MHz is pretty conservative. I did find the capacitors a little close to the ram, which might be an issue if you planned to epoxy some large ram coolers to it. The 9700 Pro comes equipped with 128MB of 256-bit DDR providing 19 840MB/second of graphics memory bandwidth. If you're keeping track, that's effectively double nVidia's top part.
   
Like the Radeon 8500 before it, you are able to hook up two monitors to the Radeon 9700. We have a basic CRT connection, a S-Video Out, as well as a DVI connection.
ATi includes a DVI-to-CRT connection, so if you do not own a flat panel, you can still hook up a CRT. A composite-out connection, S-Video and composite cable round out the package. What is commendable are the fact that the cables are so long. It's always annoyed me when a company included a 2 inch adaper, rather than a full blown cable.
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