Gigabyte Maya II Radeon GV-9500 PRO Review - PAGE 1

With Nvidia showing off a complete line of video cards tailored to various sectors of the video market, ATI was not going to sit idle with just their 9000PRO and 9700PRO cards. The fact that the 9700PRO sits atop the performance heap gives ATI the distinct advantage of being able to exploit their powerful R300 chip and card design in more toned down cards while still offering very advanced features and very fast speeds. The result is the 9500 series of cards, which features the same chip and overall design as the 9700 series, but with different core and memory clock speeds, and a lower 128bit memory bandwidth.

Because the 9700 and 9500 cards are essentially the cards with very slight differences, the two share the very same features, including full support for DirectX9.0. The two cards are so similar that the drivers are labelled "Radeon 9700/9500 series", and pictures of the two cards will leave a regular consumer wondering just where the so called differences can be found. In fact, more hardcore users have been able to hack the 9500 cards to get essentially 9700 cards, though this is a topic we'll look at later.

Let's start by looking at a comparative chart of the complete 9700/9500 line:

Specifications Comparison: 9700/9500 family
	R9700 PRO	R9700	R9500 PRO	R9500
Core clockspeed	325Mhz	275Mhz	275MHz	250Mhz
Memory Clockspeed	620Mhz (310Mhz DDR)	540Mhz (270Mhz DDR)	550MHz (275MHz DDR)	540Mhz (270Mhz DDR)
RAM	128MB	128MB	128MB	64MB
Memory Bus	256bit	256bit	128bit	128bit
Est. Current Price Range (USD)	$320-359	~$259-299	$199	<$165

As you can see, the top of the line 9700PRO has a much higher core and memory clockspeed than its counterparts. It also has a 256bit memory bus while the 9500 series has a 128bit memory bus. The 9500 regular card is also supposed to have only 4 pixel pipelines, like the Ti4600 and the Ti-4200, while the rest of the 9700/9500 family has 8 pixel pipelines. Note though that the R9500PRO is priced at least another $120USD cheaper than the 9700PRO. That's a significant savings. Let's see whether or not this is as good a buy as it appears right now.