Usually I see number of cards but Radeon 9700 is considered kinda mid range because later 9800 came out after these and is plentiful. But why 9700 not easy to find?
Cheers,
Great Northern aka Canada.
The 9700Pro was the top range card when it was released by ATI in Q4 2002. I'd never call it mid-range (the price I paid back then was certainly not mid range). It was superseded by the 9800 Pro fairly quickly (about 6 months later). The 9800 series had a much longer store life and was available in a lot of flavours, including an all-in-wonder version. (edit, apparently there's a 9700 AIW too)
A lot of 9700 Pro died because of shim problems which caused the die to overheat. To this day, it's still one of my favourit cards for an early XP machine or a very fast 98SE machine.
A lot of 9700 Pro died because of shim problems which caused the die to overheat. To this day, it's still one of my favourit cards for an early XP machine or a very fast 98SE machine.
This. Applied to the 9800-series too. A few years back I picked up lots of big loads of AGP cards. Good mix from low end to high. The 9600s almost all worked flawlessly (as did most other cards, nVidia or ATi), but the 9700s and 9800s. All dead.
Probably more than just the shim, rather that as the fan bearings wore down and the heatsinks became clogged with dust and worse, the cards got hotter. That could kill the GPU, but also the passive bits handling the power supply (long term high temps are awful for component life span), and if they went, who knows what currents and voltages went through the card.
as I understanding it the 9800XT refreshed cards didn't have the same problems. which is the one id go for I I was that interested in ATI.
I still have the 9800 Pro that I bought new back in 2003. It's still using the puny factory HSF and thermal paste (or thermal pad? I've never looked), and it works just fine. I believe that being driven at a nice and leisurely 2x AGP transfer rate by a 440BX Dell machine for well over a decade is probably why it's still alive today. 😜
I remember testing it out in a 2.8GHz Athlon 64 machine years ago and man did it run hot in there! Pumped out close to 24k in 3DMark01 though, which I never would've thought possible from a 9800 Pro!
94 MHz NEC VR4300 | SGI Reality CoPro | 8MB RDRAM | Each game gets its own SSD - nooice!
Warlord wrote on 2021-03-25, 02:54:as I understanding it the 9800XT refreshed cards didn't have the same problems. which is the one id go for I I was that interested in ATI.
Correct. In fact, that also applies to newer 9800 Pro cards based on the R360 core. I have one and the shim is a bit lower than the die, which allows for proper contact with the heatsink.
"The 9600s almost all worked flawlessly but the 9700s and 9800s. All dead."
I have same too:
- 3 pcs 9600 SE/Pro all working.
- 2 pcs 9800 Pro dead=no picture coming.
