FIC A98P Radeon 9800PRO Review - PAGE 1

Introduction:

The Radeon 9800 Pro is currently the newest and fastest graphics card to come out of ATI's door. However, current 9700 Pro owners do not need to fret because the two cards are quite similar. The board layout is almost identical and like its older brother, the 9800 Pro requires the use of molex connector to power it. The 9800 Pro requires a standard 4-pin, 5.25" connector while the 9700 Pro uses the smaller floppy power connector. The AGP slot does not provide enough juice for this power-hungry card. The Radeon 9800 was built by taking the 9700's lead in data compression and algorithms (AA, Anti Aliasing and AF, and Anisotropic Filtering) and improving upon these features and its higher efficiency in memory bandwidth usage.

The differences between the Pro and non-Pro versions of the Radeon 9800 card are 55 MHz in engine clock speed (380 versus 325) and 100 MHz in memory clock (680 MHz versus 580 MHz).

Based on the R350 chip, its configuration is very similar to R300 (Radeon 9700) in that it's still based on 150nm, still has eight pipeline pipelines, and still has much the same DX9 based feature set. However, the R300 architecture has been reworked to provide crucial tweaks in performance, support for unlimited shader lengths via the 'F-Buffer, and one overall core clock speed boost.

The 9800 and 9700 are shown side by side. (Editor's Note: check out how similar in size these two cards are - you might want a refresher of how HUGE the Nvidia FX5900 was to truly appreciate how nice it is that the 9800PRO is nearly the same size as the relatively short 9700).

The following chart summarizes the differences between the 9800 Pro and 9700 Pro along with the other two cards in the performance testing: