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Overclocking
Overclocking an already fast, and hot running videocard isn't for the feint of heart. Still, a lot of people do it, so we decided to give it a shot. The only couple of problems I can see holding us back are the .15u GPU, and the lack of memory cooling. A move to 13u would allow for higher frequencies, but I don't think ATi is going to make a move to this manufacturing process until their next generation product.
We downloaded Powerstrip, and began tweaking. I dropped a HighSpeed PC AGP Airlift to help cool down the back of the PCB. We worked in small increments, and acheived a stable overclock of 358 Core, which is approxiamately a 10% increase. At 360 Core, we experienced lockups immediately in 3D Mark Game 2, although Quake 3 ran fine for about 15 minutes before hardlocking. 359 Core didn't alieviate the problems any, but ran solid at 358.
As we mentioned earlier, the 2.8ns ram should hit 357MHz, so we immediately went for that. Oddly, we had some issues with image corruption at those speeds. We continued benchmarking anyways, but the card locked up after one round of 3D Mark. We continued to have problems at lower speeds, which led me to believe we fried the card. Fortunently at 340, things seemed to be fine again. We've been running at 358/680 (340x2) core/memory for well over a week, and the card has been rock solid under our testing. We'll look at our overclocking results later on in the review.
Test Setup
Given the lack of AGP8x boards at my disposal, all our tests will be done with 4x boards. Although we'll be missing out on the potential 8x bandwidth, I don't feel that will make much of a difference with the software we'll be using.
The focus of this review will of course be the review subject, the Radeon 9700, which will be evident in the latter stages of benchmarking. The comparison card will be the Visiontek Ti4600, which is the only competition right now even close to the 9700. I considered borrowing David's Matrox Parhelia in order to add another recent piece of hardware to the mix, but considering its troubles beating his Kyro II, I felt it would be a waste of time. Granted, we could have tested Matrox's vaunted image quality, but you can just flip back to his Parhelia review for that.
The test systems will be as follows...
AMD Athlon XP 2000+
MSI KT3 Ultra-ARU
2 x 256MB Crucial PC2700
Western Digital SE 120GB 8MB Cache
Visiontek Xtasy Ti4600
ATi Radeon 9700 Pro
The Athlon system above, generously loaned to us by one of our forum members, Quasar, will be used for comparison benchmarks. The latest VIA drivers were installed, with a fresh format of the operating system, and yes, the KT3 Ultra handles the Radeon 9700 just fine. The second test system is as follows...
Intel Pentium 4 "B" 2.4GHz @ 2.538 (18x141)
Shuttle XPC SS51G
2 x 256MB Crucial PC2700
Western Digital SE 120GB 8MB Cache
This system will be used exclusively for the Radeon 9700 Pro AA (with some Ti4600 AA thrown in) and overclocking tests.
Standard for both platforms are...
Windows XP SP1
Via 4-in-1 v4.43 (KT3)
SiS AGP Driver 1.10A (Shuttle)
nVidia Detonators 40.72 (Beta)
3D Mark 2001 SE
Unreal Tournament 2003
Code Creatures
Quake 3 Arena
Jedi Knight 2
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Given the power of the modern video card, we're dropping all tests of below 1024x768. I figure, if you paid 400$ for a video card, you better already have at least a 17" monitor and play at high resolutions. With the faster processors available, high resolution will shift the onus of the work on the video.
We will be going through all of the benchmarks first with anti-aliasing off. We're just going to be comparing the raw power of both the Ti4600 and the 9700 Pro. We chose to use the nVidia Detonators 40.72 because they are supposed to be the best performing (rumored to give an extra 1000 3D Marks, or so I was told), and are nVidia's latest. They are beta, but we haven't had any trouble with them yet.
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