PowerColor 9700 NP

[Star_Hunter]

Is the Quality of the board good. I Heard some people say its made my ATI or sapphire then I heard others say it other stuff whats your thoughts on powercolor quality and should I buy it? ($230)

[EMunEeE]

PowerColor makes a decent 9700 non pro. But it might not be the best overclocker. Sapphire overclocks better as they ship with 9700 Pro memory. :)

[Fusion]

The Sapphire NP cards are the worst, IMO.

I've been testing a few in some of my machines I sell, and believe me, they are dreadful overclockers for memory but great for the core.
Trouble is, they seem to be shipping with Infineon 3.3 ns RAM, thats meant to be around 303 mhz, yet I'm having problems getting them to 290 -295 stable.

They all are now coming on a new silver PCB, and a nice orb style cooler. But the RAM doesn't have any cooling, and putting on RAMsinks isn't helping in any way.

I've managed to get a 9700NP, in a PC I'm putting together for a friend, upto 355 core, and 295 memory tops.
But I had to flash with a warp BIOS to get it to 295.
None of the cards I tried (5 cards) had a BIOS lock on them to prevent overclocking.

Looking at some Rage3D threads, it could be some sort of memory timing issue thats there on purpose to prevent the memory going any higher.

[B&R]

I think sapphire is the best and gives good OC's results.