Radeon 9700 Pro Ultimate Editi

Rating:
Summary: Radeon 9700 Pro with Zalman Heatpipe and *no fan*
Review: This is an OEM version of Radeon's 9700 128MB Pro card with a Zalman ZM-80 heatpipe pre-installed in place of the usual fan. I decided to avoid fans after the whiny monster on the Oxygen graphics card powering my SGI 1600SW flat panel drove me to distraction. Along with an Antec Sonata case and low-noise power supply, this is a perfect component for high-power, low noise machines.

It works. It's totally silent. The heatpipe transfers heat between the two huge heatsinks on either side of the card, and it gets warm, but not too hot to touch. Motherboard temperature ranges are fine under load.

The only warning is that you need a motherboard with plenty of room between the AGP slot and both the north bridge heatsink and the memory slots; this card obscures the first PCI slot on my ASUS P4C800 board, but is otherwise fine. If you're uncertain, Zalman's web site has an active newsgroup with tech support.

It was a piece of cake to install the card in the AGP slot, install the drivers and configure. The card drove my monitor during BIOS setup, and is now running my Samsung 240T at 1920x1200 in DVI. Both Radeon and Samsung claim this is not possible in their manuals, but my results agreed with what I read on countless message boards. Not only does my Radeon 9700 work at 1920x1200 60Hz (the monitor's native resolution and frequency), but so does my Radeon 9000 Pro with 128MB. The resulting images are bright and sharp, and DVDs are scaled very easily scaled to 1920x1200 with crystal clear results. DVI is an order of magnitude sharper than VGA when driving my flat panel monitor.

Rating:
Summary: Radeon 9700 Pro with Zalman Heatpipe and *no fan*
Review: This is an OEM version of Radeon's 9700 128MB Pro card with a Zalman ZM-80 heatpipe pre-installed in place of the usual fan. I decided to avoid fans after the whiny monster on the Oxygen graphics card powering my SGI 1600SW flat panel drove me to distraction. Along with an Antec Sonata case and low-noise power supply, this is a perfect component for high-power, low noise machines.

It works. It's totally silent. The heatpipe transfers heat between the two huge heatsinks on either side of the card, and it gets warm, but not too hot to touch. Motherboard temperature ranges are fine under load.

The only warning is that you need a motherboard with plenty of room between the AGP slot and both the north bridge heatsink and the memory slots; this card obscures the first PCI slot on my ASUS P4C800 board, but is otherwise fine. If you're uncertain, Zalman's web site has an active newsgroup with tech support.

It was a piece of cake to install the card in the AGP slot, install the drivers and configure. The card drove my monitor during BIOS setup, and is now running my Samsung 240T at 1920x1200 in DVI. Both Radeon and Samsung claim this is not possible in their manuals, but my results agreed with what I read on countless message boards. Not only does my Radeon 9700 work at 1920x1200 60Hz (the monitor's native resolution and frequency), but so does my Radeon 9000 Pro with 128MB. The resulting images are bright and sharp, and DVDs are scaled very easily scaled to 1920x1200 with crystal clear results. DVI is an order of magnitude sharper than VGA when driving my flat panel monitor.