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ATI Radeon 9800 Pro ATI Radeon 9800 Pro: It's no longer their flagship product, but the 9800 Pro still provides plenty of punch at a relatively reasonable pricetag. Driver performance will be the main focus of todays review.

Date: November 20, 2003
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The ATI Radeon 9800 Pro is by no means a new product. It has been out for a few months now and more then several reviews of the card are already out there. Today we are going to take a look at the card and present you a review from a slightly different perspective.

A typical review consists of obligatory benchmarks and overclocking results. I will be doing quite a few benchmarks today, as well as attempt to overclock this card for all it is worth. On the other hand, I don't see many reviews that take the time to compare performance of a card using different driver sets and tweaking utilities.

Rather then bore you to death with technical details, which have already been covered quite well our AIW 9800 Pro review, I will be delivering information that matters the most to you as a PC user.

Sit back, relax and enjoy the review.

Specifications

Full specs are located on ATI's site, but here are some highlights:

DirectX 9++: The older 9700 Pro offers DX9 support, while the 9800 Pro exceeds specifications by offering support for Floating Point 3D textures and Cube Maps. Multiple Render target, Displacement mapping, and N-Patches are also supported. SMARTSHADER 2.1 adds a new F-Buffer technology (Fragment-stream FIFO buffer), which allows for improved pixel shader performance with an unlimited number of instructions.

SMOOTHVISION 2.1: AntiAliasing and Anisotropic Filtering (AA and AF respectively) can be a real video card killer, and with SMOOTHVISION 2.1, there are improvements made to the memory controller (in hardware) that allows for better performance.

HyperZ III+: The 9800 Pro has an enhanced Z-Cache that improves the VPU's ability to render real-time shadow volumes. When Doom 3 comes out, the 9800 Pro will be able to handle the stencil buffer data more efficiently than its predecessors.

The ATI Radeon 9800 Pro

ATI went with quite a small box to package their 9800 Pro. The box is less then a foot wide and about 10 inches tall. Since all that came in the package was the card, necessary cables and a driver disk, I doubt ATI found it necessary to go with over the top packaging, which is fine by me.

The ATI Radeon 9800 is based on a fire engine red PCB. There are only a couple of manufacturers that actually make these cards for ATI, so card performance, quality and aesthetics are pretty much the same from manufacturer to manufacturer, with the exception of companies like Gigabyte and Hercules, who manufacture the cards at different facilities then ATI.

On the upper right hand side of the card, if you are looking at it from the front of the cooler, is the four pin molex connector needed to power the card. If you forget to connect the molex connector to the card an error message is presented to you before the system even boots. I found that it was best to give the 9800 Pro its own power source, as using a four pin molex connection that was split between two hard drives did not give the card enough power and it would give me occasional warning messages during POST. This is something you need to think about before purchasing this card.

The Radeon 9800 Pro has three connections, all of them for video output. There is a standard VGA connection, an S-Video connection and a DVI connection. The Radeon 9800 Pro is indeed capable of displaying across multiple monitors, making the multiple connection points a necessity.

The Radeon 9800 Pro is based on a .15 micron manufacturing process. This is important information to be aware of because the .15 process is going to yield a hotter GPU, which will require better cooling. ATI, who has never won any benchmarks via brute force, went with a low profile cooling system for the 9800 Pro. While the cooling system is definitely adequate, it is by no means great. Aftermarket heat pipe solutions from companies such as Zalman have been known to yield far better cooling results then the stock cooling unit. The main problem with the stock cooler is that the fan motor sits directly over the GPU, causing a dead spot where hot air can build up.

The Radeon 9800 Pro uses Samsung K4D26323RA BGA memory, which is rated for 350 MHZ operation. ATI has clocked the memory to its rated speed in the case of the 9800 Pro. Our overclocking results will show the absolute limit of these IC's.

The Drivers

Now that we have seen what the card looks like (again) we will be looking at some of the different drivers available for the 9800. Keep in mind that all of these drivers actually come from ATI. Omega uses the original Catalyst drivers and edits them for better image quality and stability. We will be looking at the performance of the Catalyst 3.6, 3.7 and Omega 3.6 build during today's testing. For comparison numbers against the FX5900, you can read this review.


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