I just got this DiabloTek PCI Radeon 9000 64MB (V9000-P64) circa 2009 in the mail yesterday, and I discovered that it’s a complete turkey. I don’t mind the PCI bus bottleneck (in fact, I bought it for the PCI interface) but this card has lots of other short-comings.
First, DiabloTek didn’t use a desktop Radeon 9000 chip (RV250). This card actually has a Mobility Radeon 9000 (M9). That’s not really a problem given they’re basically the same GPU, but later ATI drivers won’t recognize it as a desktop card without modification because the M9 has a different PCI ID. I discovered this when the included drivers identified the card as a Mobility Radeon 9000.
Next, it seemed to run really slow so I used GPU-Z to see what was going on with this card. That’s when I got a couple of nasty surprises. DiabloTek way underclocked this GPU. The video BIOS runs this card at 180MHz on the GPU (vice 250MHz on a stock Radeon 9000) and the memory at 126MHz DDR (vice 200MHz on a normal Radeon 9000). Strangely, the card has a mixture of 200MHz and 250MHz memory chips.
Worst of all, this card uses a 64-bit data bus from the memory. This card is seriously bandwidth starved.
I managed to run Powerstrip 3.2 with the early Radeon Drivers from 2002 for a decent overclock on the GPU (up to 240MHz) and a little more from the memory (162MHz DDR) with stable results. I got about 25% improvement in benchmark performance with this overclock, but I think this card leaves a lot of performance on the table without a 128-bit bus.
If you’re in the market for a PCI Radeon 9000, I suggest staying away from these DiabloTek cards. They also sold a 128MB version which likely uses a 128-bit data bus. I suspect that card hosts a Radeon Mobility too with similar underclocks.
I got mine for a decent price compared to others on eBay, but I don’t think this card was worth what I paid for it. These cards definitely aren’t worth the $70-$100 US asking price in most auctions.
I’m going to keep my eye out for an older Radeon 9000 from another brand.