They really were not that pretty. But few cards were back then. But theyre lacklustre appearance hides the awesome power these cards hold.

I still need to buy a 9700pro and 9800pro for my collection, but they still fetch way too much money on ebay. And it seems people are holding on to them for a little too long.

I had a 9800pro a long time ago and there was an option on the control panel to switch openGL into ASCI(or was it ANSI?). Quake 3 looked amazing but it was a little hard to aim. Such a cool feature though!

Nice ramsinks BTW! 😈

These cards were awesome when they were first released in the form of the 9500/9700. I still have a 9500 here that was unlockable to a full 9700, the only difference being they put slower memory chips on the 9500 so you'll never get full 9700 speeds on those but you can come pretty close with the core. You have to steer clear of the 9500 Pro cards, though. They are the ones that have the memory chips arranged in a straight line across the top instead of in an L configuration like on the 9700. They used a core that is closer to the 9600 and has no unlockable pipes. The 9600 was an odd card in itself. It was actually slower in most cases than the 9500 it replaced. They were going for power efficiency and passive cooling with the 9600. I guess they figured putting a fan on was too big an expense for their entry level card so they knocked down the clocks to keep the chips from heating up too much. The 9800 was still outstanding even against the FX5800 from nVidia. It wouldn't be until the GF 6800 was released that nVidia would have a serious challenger for ATi to compete against. A 9700/9800 is probably the best card you could buy for games of that time frame. These cards are also the last ones that you can get that have an official Win 98 driver. NVidia hung on a bit longer with Win 98 so if you need the absolute fastest card for Win 98, then the GF 6x00 cards are what you want but the Radeons still aren't bad.

sliderider wrote:

You have to steer clear of the 9500 Pro cards, though. They are the ones that have the memory chips arranged in a straight line across the top instead of in an L configuration like on the 9700. They used a core that is closer to the 9600 and has no unlockable pipes.

Actually the 9500 (non-Pro) was the one that was missing half the rendering pipes (disabled by default). Whether you could unlock the disabled ones or not was all a matter of chance. The Pro still retained the 8 full pipes that the 9700/9800 has.

if you want a 9800pro. there is one on ebay that is being sold by an idiot that will probably go for cheap. aftermarket cooler too!

http://cgi.ebay.com/Video-Card-PN-109-a07500- … =item2a100828ee

^ Haha, what a waste to give up, smh.

Pippy P. Poopypants wrote:

sliderider wrote:

You have to steer clear of the 9500 Pro cards, though. They are the ones that have the memory chips arranged in a straight line across the top instead of in an L configuration like on the 9700. They used a core that is closer to the 9600 and has no unlockable pipes.

Actually the 9500 (non-Pro) was the one that was missing half the rendering pipes (disabled by default). Whether you could unlock the disabled ones or not was all a matter of chance. The Pro still retained the 8 full pipes that the 9700/9800 has.

But they halved the memory throughput , so the 9500 pro is still slower then 9700 (or the unlocked 9500!). Sliderider is right, if anything - the 9500 was the biggest bang for the buck of that time.

9500 Pro was but not the plain 9500. The plain 9500 was about the speed of a Ti 4400 or even 4200.

I think the plain 9700 was one of the more exciting options. They would often overclock right past the stock 9700 Pro. I had one that went from 275 to 360 MHz or something which put it in the realm of the 9800 Pro. That was a gigantic improvement over my previous Radeon 8500.

luckybob wrote:

if you want a 9800pro. there is one on ebay that is being sold by an idiot that will probably go for cheap. aftermarket cooler too!

http://cgi.ebay.com/Video-Card-PN-109-a07500- … =item2a100828ee

I will never buy a card with an aftermarket cooler. It has to be 100% pureblood vanilla untampered. Just a weird tick I have, don't know why. But yes, clearly he don't know what he has, which also tells me theres a 50/50 chance it even works. And he is in America... 😖

I will sit and wait and watch... sooner or later one will come up that gives me a funny feeling inside my tummy.

Iris030380 wrote:

I will never buy a card with an aftermarket cooler. It has to be 100% pureblood vanilla untampered. Just a weird tick I have, don't know why.

Same feeling here. And if it comes boxed, with manuals and software it's just great! It's like you owned it from day one.

I actually like many of the aftermarket coolers. I prefer a modded graphics card over having a jet engine inside my case...but that's just me. What I don't like is a modded card that has the aftermarket cooler epoxied to the GPU 🙁
And often the original fans are dead/very loud anyway, I'd rather not use them like this, but that's just my opinion though 😉

I do like original manuals and such, even though they may be totally outdated 😁

Tetrium wrote:

I actually like many of the aftermarket coolers. I prefer a modded graphics card over having a jet engine inside my case...but that's just me. What I don't like is a modded card that has the aftermarket cooler epoxied to the GPU 🙁
And often the original fans are dead/very loud anyway, I'd rather not use them like this, but that's just my opinion though 😉

I do like original manuals and such, even though they may be totally outdated 😁

I do have cards with aftermarket coolers (mostly Zalman and Cooler Master), but i like to do it myself and keep the original cooler.

If you want an "original cooler" they are all over the place on ebay for like $5. Seriously. Becides, the cooler that he has on that card is a VERY GOOD cooler for its day. I had one on my 9600SE.

swaaye wrote:

9500 Pro was but not the plain 9500. The plain 9500 was about the speed of a Ti 4400 or even 4200.

...only if you don't unlock it (why would you get a 9500 if not to unlock it?). Unlock success rate from the cards I've seen was nearly 100% and the 9500 as such had max 5% lower scores then original 9700 that you love so much 😀

In that way, its not even better then a Ti4400, but better then the GF FX 5800.

P.S. Unlocking is not overclocking - its a safe operation that requires only Rivatuner or similar program that will modify the driver a bit.

swaaye wrote:

9500 Pro was but not the plain 9500. The plain 9500 was about the speed of a Ti 4400 or even 4200.

I think the plain 9700 was one of the more exciting options. They would often overclock right past the stock 9700 Pro. I had one that went from 275 to 360 MHz or something which put it in the realm of the 9800 Pro. That was a gigantic improvement over my previous Radeon 8500.

He's right. The 9500 non-pro with 128mb memory had the same 256-bit memory bus as the 9700/9700 Pro only with slower rated chips. The 9500 Pro came with a 128-bit memory bus, so unlocking a 9500 non-Pro to 8-pipes would make it faster than a 9500 Pro and almost as fast a vanilla 9700 with only the memory clocks holding it back. The 9700 Pro would still be the fastest. The 9500 non-Pro was also available with 64mb RAM and a 128-bit bus, so you really want to keep clear of that one.

Hmm well if you can unlock it and it works (I doubt they all do) then yeah it is pretty neat. But most of the 9500s used that board with the single row of RAM and were permanently 128-bit. I see a lot of those on fleabay. They came in both 64MB and 128MB configs.

My feeling is that the earliest 9500s were obviously just BIOS gimped 9700s. But later they did some cost reduction and made the simpler PCB.

swaaye wrote:

Hmm well if you can unlock it and it works (I doubt they all do) then yeah it is pretty neat. But most of the 9500s used that board with the single row of RAM and were permanently 128-bit. I see a lot of those on fleabay. They came in both 64MB and 128MB configs.

My feeling is that the earliest 9500s were obviously just BIOS gimped 9700s. But later they did some cost reduction and made the simpler PCB.

Yup, though I havent heard much about the 64mb version and I certainly never seen one. But I've seen many of these:
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/screenshots/or … -scan-front.jpg
...and those were awesome 😀

The 'cheaper' version came with the 9600 / 9600 pro. Good cards, but not as good as the 'original' 9500 😉

P.S. I've searched the fleabay and I only got the 'real' versions of it:
http://cgi.ebay.de/Radeon-9500-128Mb-/2207735 … =item336720dc42

http://cgi.ebay.de/ATI-Radeon-9500-128-MB-/15 … =item2310336fa0

elfuego wrote:

P.S. I've searched the fleabay and I only got the 'real' versions of it:

German Fleabay anyway. Yankee Fleabay has 2 128-bit boards and 1 256-bit right now. I'm surprised there are only 3. Of course there are a zillion 9700s yet because of all the old OEM sales.

I find the recently-built 9800s curious indeed. Surples R350 chips huh?
http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-ATI-Radeon-9800-Pro-2 … =item41578bb521
Check out that cheap PCB 🤣 128-bit 9800 Pro huh?

swaaye wrote:

Hmm well if you can unlock it and it works (I doubt they all do) then yeah it is pretty neat. But most of the 9500s used that board with the single row of RAM and were permanently 128-bit. I see a lot of those on fleabay. They came in both 64MB and 128MB configs.

My feeling is that the earliest 9500s were obviously just BIOS gimped 9700s. But later they did some cost reduction and made the simpler PCB.

That one pictured is a 9500 Pro. The non-Pro has two chips across the top and two down the back like a 9700 except for the 64mb version which has two across the top and two empty pads down the back for the two missing memory chips.

Originally the 9500 non-Pro was created so ATi could make use of their binned 9700 chips with defective pipes. When demand exceeded the supply of binned chips, they started using fully functional 9700 cores with 4 cores locked, so some do unlock and some artifact to varying degrees when you try to unlock them depending on how badly damaged the core is. I do not think this was ever the case with the Pro version of the card as they were never unlockable but they used a crippled memory controller to keep it from competing too directly with the 9700. ATi went through the same thing with the 9800 SE being unlockable to a full 9800 and the X800GTO2 being unlockable to a X850 XT. I think they started laser cutting their cores after that.

I have a X800GTO2 turned X850XT still. 😀 The RAM on mine is nuts and goes up to around 630MHz without issue.

I did not know of the magical intricacies of the lowly early 9500 NP. Actually I probably forgot 🤣