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Drivers
In the past, ATi didn't exactly have the best driver support. Either the drivers were buggy, or they were missing features altogether (SMOOTHVISION). I had a lot of buddies turned off by ATi because they couldn't get the original Radeon to work in Windows 2000.
   
ATi has come a long way since then, and their drivers have improved a lot. There are still a couple of bugs with D3D games, but at least they know about it, and are working on it. What has brought good press though, are their new Catalyst drivers. No longer do you need to download huge driver packages, getting lost what drivers go with what card. You can download individual packages, be it drivers, control panel software, ATi's Multimedia Center, etc... ATi also promises to be more timely with updates, though they're still not at the nearly daily leaked Detonator rate. Still, it's always better to get official drivers when they're ready, rather than hosing your system with betas.
  
Something we didn't mention earlier, but is driver related, is DirectX. The Radeon 9700 is supposed to be compatible with DirectX 9, meaning that DX 9's features are to be supported in hardware. Well, considering that DX 9 isn't out yet, it's pretty much out of the question in terms of testing. Considering that the majority of games don't even tap into DX 8.1's featureset, and the Radeon being a full DX 8.1 part, this shouldn't be much of a concern for now.
Other than that, the Catalyst drivers allows for all the tweaking you may want, such as AA levels, and anisotropic levels. Missing are overclocking options, but that's what Powerstrip is for.
Installation
I wanted to talk a bit about this topic, because it's been heavily discussed in various forums, particularly at . I may as well get it off my back, but I tested the card on a friend's Asus P4S8X, and it plain wouldn't work. It happened that his BIOS was older, and flashing it to the latest version seemed to have solved his problems. I should note that I was fully aware this was a problematic board, and wanted to see the problem myself. The problem we encountered was a blank screen, and no picture until Windows loaded up. If you're wondering why this would be a problem, have you ever tried tweaking the BIOS with no picture? 
Back on our workbench, I tested the card on our MSI KT3 Ultra2, MSI 845E Max2, and our Shuttle XPC SS51. The card worked perfectly on all three platforms. I was pleasently surprised it worked on the SS51, given it's 200W PSU, but as I'm writing the review, no problems to report. As for the AMD and Pentium 4 motherboards, both were running off an Enermax 550W PSU. I slapped in an Antec 300W (not a Truepower PSU), and didn't encounter any instability issues.
The above readings were taken from the Shuttle XPC, using Motherboard Monitor. As you can see, we're a little short on the 12V, and 3.3V rails, but nothing terribly alarming. Most power supplies are about 5% off the tolerances, and we're closer to 1%. Morale of the story? Quality plays a big role, and don't be fooled by a generic 400W PSU. Go for a quality company.
Physical compatibility was a non-issue. It's smaller than the nVidia Ti4600, and is more "standard" sized. Unless for some bizarre reason, your hard drives are installed in such a way that it gets in the way of AGP cards, I don't expect any problems.
Before investing in the Radeon 9700, I do suggest browsing the forums at Rage3D, as it provides an invaluable wealth of information. They also have a compiled at the site, so you can take a quick peak at some motherboards submitted by their readers that worked with the 9700.
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