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Radeon 9500 Pro Review

We've already previewed the 9500 Pro a while back, and now it's time to take a look at the final retail version of the card that's shipping and compare it with the competition. Read inside for the lowdown on ATI's answer to the mainstream market.

Introduction

ATI is showing itself in a whole new light lately. If you've been around long enough to see the evolution of ATI’s graphics cards, back from the time of their very first 3D accelerator, you'll know that there have been issues with both cards and drivers. I won't go through every issue other than to say at one time ATI was not seen as a major 3D player in the hardcore gaming field. Fast forward, however, to today and they are now not only a major player in the field, but on top of it for hardcore gamers. With the battle between NVIDIA and ATI heating up to determine who has the best video card at the high end, we must not forget about the importance of the mainstream market. The sub $200 mark is a price point that a greater number of people are able to afford. The idea is to have a great performing product, but have it cost a lot less. The 9500 Pro is just that.

ATI officially announced the 9500 Pro back in October. We took a look at a preview board back then to get an idea where the 9500 Pro would lie in terms of performance. It's important to note that our preview board was basically a 9700 Pro that had been reduced to 64MB of DDR to force it to a 128bit memory bus and then downclocked to the 9500 Pro core and memory speeds. What this did was give us an idea of what the 9500 Pro would be like. What it didn’t do was give us an accurate representation of specific real world results. The preview board only had a working 64MB of DDR, where the retail version has a full 128MB of DDR on a 128bit bus. I will go ahead and recap the key points on the specs of the 9500 Pro from our preview article.

ATI is introducing the Radeon 9500 Pro to the performance mainstream market in the $199 price range. This directly competes against the GF4 Ti 4200 and GF4 Ti 4200-8X GPUs. The Radeon 9500 Pro VPU is exactly the same as the 9700. It's clocked at 275MHz and has the same features as the 9700 and 9700 Pro. The big difference is a reduction to a 128-bit memory bus operating at 540MHz. At 128-bits wide, the memory bandwidth is 8.8GB/sec.

ATI Radeon 9500 Pro

The first thing you'll notice is that the PCB layout is different than that of the 9700 Pro we're all used to. The 256-bit bus requires an 8-layer PCB, which is more expensive to manufacture. The 9500 Pro with a 128-bit bus can reduce the layers needed, making the PCB itself cheaper to make. The 9500 Pro still uses 8 BGA RAM modules just like the 9700 Pro, except that on this card they're all arranged above the VPU on the front and back.

In the pictures above you can compare the 9700 Pro on top to the 9500 Pro’s layout on the bottom.

One problem you probably already see in the pictures is the location of the power connector. The 9500 Pro still requires a power connector due to the AGP slot not supplying enough power for this .15 micron core. Because of the PCB layout change on the 9500 Pro, they had to move the power connector back on the card. Unfortunately, when you have the power cable plugged in, it covers the immediate RAM module it's next to. The plug covers a section of that memory module, making it very hard to impossible to put a proper RAM sink on that module should you require more cooling.

Another change they made with this card was to switch from Samsung BGA memory modules to Hynix BGA memory modules. One other thing I noticed is the DIP switch that's on the 9500 Pro. This switch lets you change between NTSC and PAL. The 9700 Pro PCB has the footprint for the switch, but it's not present.

The 9500 Pro VPU above shares the same R300 core the 9700 and 9700 Pro use. The heatsink had a sufficient amount of thermal material which covered the core quite well.

We have seen some articles that suggest that the rim around the VPU keeps the stock heatsink from touching the surface of the VPU. This is true if you remove the stock TIM.

Keep in mind that the engineers at ATI do know how to measure and have done this for a reason. That reason being is that they have allowed them a bit more room between the heatsink and the VPU, obviously. The reason for the more room is to make sure the heatsink does not come into direct contact with the VPU physically breaking it.

So if you are going install your own aftermarket cooling system on the 9500 or 9700 series VidCard, you will need to pay special attention to this.