Rating: 
Summary: This Card Kills Any NIVIDAS Geforces 4 period!!!
Review: ATI has certainly delivered on all accounts with the Radeon 9700 Pro. Not only does it beat the competition in every benchmark thrown at it, but in most tests, it simply rips other cards apart. Performance is phenomenal across the board, but the R9700 Pro really shows its strength when used in high resolution gaming, especially with full-scene anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. Using this card and a fairly fast processor, gaming at 1600 x 1200 is a reality with every current game on the market. Or,if your monitor doesn't like high resolutions, crank it down to 1024 x 768 or 1280 x 1024 and turn on the anti-aliasing and get extremely good performance as well.
Worth every earned penny!
Rating: 
Summary: ATI -Vs- Nvidia
Review: ATI's Hardware is better, Nvidia's Drivers are better...
Save some money and go for a Nvidia card, Un-broken drivers mean better preformance.
I have this card and I have a Nvidia TNT 2 Pro, The TNT card works almost as good as this one.
Rating: 
Summary: some ati problems
Review: before you buy this, take this into consideration, the radeon 9000 series have bugs on some systems, with the current catalyst 3.6 video drivers Half-Life games give you low frames per second (a little choppy) i have the radeon 9700 and it works very good for battlefield1942 but i am kind of dissapointed in its Half-Life performance, i am PRETTY SURE they will fix the half-life problems in the next video drivers ATI releases
Rating: 
Summary: AIW9700 pro fails to work under SIS648 chipset
Review: CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH .. STUTTER .. BLINK CRASH Cause most likely traced "after three weeks of investigation!)- to SIS 648 chipset. This is KNOWN to cause problems. Why didn't someone tell me? New motherboard now needed. You have been warned! Did I mention CRASH?
Rating:
Summary: Great card
Review: Great card have had a few driver problem but Radeon come out with the fix rapidly.
Rating:
Summary: Step aside nVidia, you have been replaced.
Review: Having owned a PC since the days of the 8-bit ESA bus, it amazes how far the technology has come along. My current PC has 128 times the ram and 666 times the hard drive storage. My very first video card was an awesome Trident 1 meg video card that could actually do 1024x768- my monitor didn't like it, but it could it. In those days there was no such thing as 3D acceleration, that was still four years away when the first Voodoo cards appeared and the PC games industry took off. My first 3D video card was a 3Dfx Voodoo 2 that had to be connected to my 2 meg Cirrus Logic card in order to work. Those were heady days! The performance increase was staggering and those games of mine that supported 3D looked as though they were totally new games. Since then I have owned a Voodoo 3 16 mb, GeForce 2 32 mb DDR, and GeForce 4 64 mb DDR. That as seven years ago. I have since owned two more 3Dfx cards, two nVidia and now an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. First let me say that installation took all of five minutes, including a quick hop over to ATI's website for the latest driver update. The 9700 replaces my one year old nVidia GeForce 4 and what a happy day it was to see that card go. While the performance difference was not as staggering as when I went from my old 2D card to the 3Dfx, overall performance of games running on my Athlon 1900 XP+ with 512 mb of PC2100 ram was very real and noticeable. I could have gone with the new nVidia GeForce 5800 Ultra, but the half dozen or so reviews all said the same thing- it doesn't compare to the 9700/9800 cards. (The 9800 is basically the same card as the 9700 with a slightly faster core clock and RAM speed.) It [the nVidia 5800 Ultra] also makes a lot of noise- nVidia had thought it was a good idea to attach a hunk of plastic that directed all of the air flowing over the heat sink out the back of a PC- something that made a great deal of noise. The Ultra also takes up the PCI slot immediately adjacent the AGP slot. Good thinking guys! The 9700 Pro allows me to run Unreal Tournament 2003 at 1024x768 resolution with all graphics and effects settings to max. with my GeForce 4 I could do that resolution, but had to set everything else to 'normal' or 'medium' as far as effects are concerned or else I'd start dropping frames by the bucket. Every other game I own- Medal of Honor, Unreal II and Jedi Outcast have shown explosive performance increases over the nVidia card. It is also rock solid stable- no stuttering, frame drops or any other problems. In fact, I have had NO problems with this card. None. That said, I could care less how good Unreal Tournament 2003 looks- that's just candy. I got the card solely for Relic's upcoming release of Homeworld 2 and I wanted a card that could provide me with the best bang for the buck. I had toyed with getting the 9800, but I doubt I really would have noticed a huge improvement between the 9700. At this point, nVidia was no longer in the running- the 9700 Pro stomps it like a narc at a biker rally. I see no reason the spend the money to have a glorified leaf blower whistling out the back of my PC and taking up an extra slot. Get a 9700 or 9800 Pro - it's the nicest thing you can do for your PC.
Rating:
Summary: Mixed blessing
Review: I agree that this card has some very good points when it comes to gaming and other applications (video quality in watching DVDs is excellent compared to my older Nvidia card). I have noticed increased performance, speed, fps and textures in several games, too. However, I have also noticed that since installing the card (it's less than three weeks old as of this writing), I've been getting increased system lock-ups in the middle of game playing and DVD watching, something that was never a problem before. ATI recommends that you have at least a 300 watt power supply to get the best performance out of the 9700 Pro, and so I had upgraded that (to a 350 watt one) shortly after I bought the card. The funny thing is, I really didn't notice that much difference in performance when I was using a 200 watt power supply. My computer is also a Pentium III 1.4Ghz with 384MB, it should in theory be more than ample to run the card flawlessly. I can't tell for sure if the drivers are to blame, as been discussed many times. I used the ones that came with the product and also the newest ones from their website, and it didn't seem to matter, nor did it matter what settings I used. I'd still get random lock-ups. And even though I'm using Windows XP, the crashes are bad enough to require re-booting of the system. Sometimes it takes several re-boots before the system comes back to its proper capacity (i.e., after the Windows XP logo comes on, the screen stays blank--no option to do a "safe mode" or "last configuration" menu option boot. I'm not even sure if the card is overheating, even though it has its own built-in fan (and yes, it runs fine). As of now, I'm having second thoughts about the card, which I had bought due to many great reviews it had. Maybe I should have waited for the newer GeForce FX, as I had never had problems with Nvidia cards and drivers like I do now with ATI products. I generally like the card, BUT with reservations. If I had enjoyed the stability I thought I would be getting (especially considering I'm using Windows XP), it'd get five stars from me. Performance is one thing, but without running into the inconvenience of crashes, it's just not worth it. The only time I haven't experienced crashes is when I do light stuff, like surfing the net, word processing, writing e-mail, etc. When it comes to "heavy duty" gaming (why it crashes on older games dating back to 1998 is beyond me), I seem to be missing the boat on this one. Your mileage may vary.
Rating:
Summary: Best card out there
Review: I bought this video card about a month ago and it is by far the best purchase I made for my PC. Before, I had a 32 MB Radeon VE and could barely play 3D games. Now, I can pump up the graphics and the game runs smooth. I am running a 1.2 Ghz Athlon and many of the most advanced 3D shooters and games still run very well. If you want to buy this card, don't wait. It will last at least 2 years and is definitely worth the money.
Rating:
Summary: My headache's caused by nVidia crashes are over
Review: I got this card about 2 weeks ago and it has lowered my stress considerably. I use my computer heavily and go through parts and upgrades quickly. While I always admired the lionized power of the geforce line of video cards, all three geforces that I have used in the last year constantly crash my computers. Needless to say, this behavior disrupts important applications, algorithms that are in the middle of a three day running period, and the stability of the overall computer. This card has been running smoothly since its been in the computer without a problem or onscreen news (no news from computer parts is good news). As a result, I run my programs and work much more at ease. I cannot speak as to its performance on games, but its general performance for all types of multitasking with high powered applications has been flawless and quick. I definatly reccomend this to those seeking computer harmony.
Rating:
Summary: Radeon 9700 Pro - For Those of You With the Lock-Up Issue
Review: I had this same event occur. I would be doing things for a while but the minute I acivated a game that had to use heavy-ended 3-D capability.... lock-up. I thought like everyone else has that hey, this must be a system issue. So I changed out drivers, tried adjusting the settings, using a different version of Direct-X and many more things. Still.. the lock-ups. I finally broke down and got a professional to assess the situation. What I was told is that on some ATI Radeon models, specifically mentioned were the Radeon 9000 and the Radeon 9700 Pro, that the heatsink does not make proper contact with the "die" (the graphics chip) due to the metal border around the core housing (the little metal box surrounding the chip area). So it seems that this is in fact an overheating problem. We tested taking the stock ATI cooler off and using a different one. The lock-up time did in fact change. We tried yet another way and again the lock-up time changed. I have heard that the Zalman Heatpipe GPU cooler has been a successful cure to this problem. I am also looking into the Thermaltake GIANT 2 to see how that may perform (reasoning is that the Thermaltake has an active fan in addition to the heatpipe layout). When I could get the card to work, the results were amazing. I was blown away at the rendering and speed. The clarity was beautiful and the frame rates were screaming! Other than the overheating issue that kept me from really using my system for over a month, this card is worth it. Mind you, this problem only occured in some cards, not all, so you might be the fortunate one not to get the problem. My recommendation is to contact your local computer dealer and see what they might have for options on a new GPU cooler system. Good luck and hope this helps those of you that were suffering through the same things I was. Happy computing ;)
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