Date:
Thursday , April 17, 2003
Author:
Sean Pelletier
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Radeon 9600 Pro Overclocking

Good things come to those who wait, and there is no doubt that the ATI 9600 Pro is not clock locked.

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9700 Pro Comparison

Having seen how the overclocked Radeon 9600 Pro compares to the other cards in its class, we decided to throw caution to the wind and see how it fared against the Radeon 9700 Pro. Overall, this should give us all a good impression of how far you can stretch your sub-$200 investment.

3DMark03

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Taking a look across the results for the selected tests, we find the Radeon 9600 Pro provides some serious competition for the mighty 9700 Pro. Here, the Radeon 9700 Pro certainly has the advantage of higher fill-rate and eight pipelines at its disposal. Regardless, the $199 Radeon 9600 Pro manages to keep close to pace with ATI's flagship card from just a few months ago.

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No matter how fast we clock the Radeon 9600 Pro, the card will never be able to overcome a fill-rate gap like this. Viewing the graph we find the monstrous single-texturing fill-rate of the 9700 Pro which is nearly 400MTexels per second ahead of the overclocked Radeon 9600 Pro. Looking at the multi-texturing fill-rate, we see that the numbers are significantly closer though the 9700 Pro is clearly ahead.

Splinter Cell

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Looking at this graph, we see the overclocked 9600 Pro has managed to equal the 9700 Pro's performance at each resolution. Apparently, ATI has done an excellent polishing job on their latest generation of cards and have prepared them to perform extremely well on the newer breed of games.

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Once more, we find the Radeon 9600 Pro rivaling the 9700 Pro. Considering the fact that most 9700 Pro's are still selling for $299, the fact that the 9600 Pro is even competitive ( albeit overclocked ) certainly speaks volumes about the card's overall value.

Unreal Tournament 2003

As was the case in the review, the numbers illustrated within these graphs was collected using HardOCP's UT2003 Benchmarking utility version 2.1.

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For the first time, we see the Radeon 9700 Pro maintain a large lead over the rest of the field. Overall, we are seeing some exceptional numbers coming out of this $199 card.