Gigabyte's Radeon 9700 Pro - Hitting 400MHz

Final Words

Provided that Gigabyte can fix the prerelease issues we ran into with our card then they'll obviously make a nice contribution to the Radeon 9700 series with their GV-R9700Pro. We'd like to see Gigabyte move to a larger heatsink with a better support mechanism as well as a larger but slower spinning fan to reduce noise. We would also like to see some of ATI's board partners (Gigabyte included) take the initiative to release a version of the Radeon 9700 Pro that goes above and beyond what ATI has set forth with their board; we'd like to see features like dual DVI outputs, as well as basic video capture functionality for those users that don't necessarily want to cope with the heavy price tag of ATI's forthcoming All-in-Wonder Radeon 9700 while still retaining basic capturing ability.

Quite possibly more important than R300 boards by ATI's Taiwanese partners, is the incredible overclocking success we had with the Radeon 9700 Pro. The fact that we were able to overclock the very first revisions of the shipping R300 core to speeds as high as 400MHz leads us to believe that there's much more potential in the R300 that ATI has yet to expose. The main limitation at this point seems to be memory bandwidth and die size; the lack of additional memory bandwidth and die size constraints prevented ATI from going to two texture units per pipeline, which would definitely increase performance across the board.

We can see ATI's 0.13-micron successor to the R300 implementing that precious second texture unit, but if the need should arise we can also see ATI releasing a slightly faster version of the Radeon 9700 Pro in the interim. At higher resolutions, a bump up to a 400MHz core clock and a 674MHz memory clock gave us as much as a 15% performance boost.

ATI's board partners may also want to take it upon themselves to release their own overclocked versions of the Radeon 9700 Pro akin to what NVIDIA partners did during the days of the TNT2. Although NVIDIA has tightened up what they allow their board partners to do when it comes to shipping products overclocked, it may be in ATI's best interest to give a little more freedom in this respect to really get their partners' feet off the ground.