DaveW
02-21-03, 02:23 PM
I got my 9700 yesterday. I instantly cracked open my case and installed it. I switched on the PC and was greeted by the following multi-media awesomeness....
*beeeep beep beep*
For those of you not familiar with bios error beep codes, this is the bios saying "where is your graphics card?"
uh oh...
I uninstalled, reinstalled, checked the power cable etc... no go. I installed my Ti4200 and it booted fine... I loaded windows and browsed the web. Apparently the no-boot problem is an issue with other users of my motherboard (Gigabyte GA-8SG667) even with the latest bios. I was about to box up the board and send it back. A searched on google found a thread in which one guy was able to start his machine by hitting the reset buton after powering on. I tried that and it worked, the machine booted up. I didn't find a good solution. So now, every time I switch on my machine I have to hit the power button and then the reset button. I think I can live with this, since my PC stays on for days at a time anyway. Its still annoying, though.
I flashed the bios so I can overclock (the 9700 non-pro is locked by default), installed the latest drivers and overclocked it 10%. Then I proceeded to try out some software...
Results:
The RF Interference issue: I experienced it. Its like a couple faint shadow lines moving diagonally across your screen. I am not too surprised, my wall outlet power supply is very "dirty" and isn't even grounded (I get shocked from my case all the time). Plus I have 20 million fans and a neon light in my case. It seems the 9700 is just more vulnerable to RFI than my Ti4200. The interference is very slight and is _not_ visible 99% of the time. I only see it when the screen contains a large block of a certain tone of blue-ish gray. There are various things to try to get rid of the RFI and I haven't tried them yet, since I only saw the RFI twice and it wasn't enough to bother me.
Now for the good news:
The stuttering issue: I didn't see any, anywhere.
Drivers: Believe it or not, ATI's drivers don't suck anymore. Infact I think I prefer them over nVidia's drivers :eek: . They have many more options and much more tweakable. I found two programs - the alpha of a certain game (which I can't mention here) and the IG3 demo which ran fine on the 9700 but have been broken on my Ti4200 since the 40.xx drivers came out.
2D image quality: I doubted this would be noticeable but I was suprised. On my monitor text has always been slightly blurry when the desktop res was aboce 1024x768. I always figured this was my cheap monitor, but when I installed the 9700 desktop became clear and crisp. The adaptive-deinterlacing does make DVDs look better than on my Ti4200, it almost looks like the resolution of the DVD has increased.
Performance: I didn't do much benchmarking though I did a quick, unprofessional comparison in Unreal 2:
Ti4200 2xAA 2xAF 800x600 - 33 fps
9700 4xAA 4xAF 1024x768 - 42 fps
Twice the AA, twice the AF, higher res and STILL a nice performance increase. What more could you ask for? There is no doubt that the 9700 is very efficient with AA and AF. Its nice to no longer have to pick and choose between AA vs AF vs high res.
Compatibility: UT2003, Unreal 2, SoF 2, AoM, BF1942 and the alpha of a certain game that I am not allowed to mention. So far I have not encountered any compatibility problems.
*beeeep beep beep*
For those of you not familiar with bios error beep codes, this is the bios saying "where is your graphics card?"
uh oh...
I uninstalled, reinstalled, checked the power cable etc... no go. I installed my Ti4200 and it booted fine... I loaded windows and browsed the web. Apparently the no-boot problem is an issue with other users of my motherboard (Gigabyte GA-8SG667) even with the latest bios. I was about to box up the board and send it back. A searched on google found a thread in which one guy was able to start his machine by hitting the reset buton after powering on. I tried that and it worked, the machine booted up. I didn't find a good solution. So now, every time I switch on my machine I have to hit the power button and then the reset button. I think I can live with this, since my PC stays on for days at a time anyway. Its still annoying, though.
I flashed the bios so I can overclock (the 9700 non-pro is locked by default), installed the latest drivers and overclocked it 10%. Then I proceeded to try out some software...
Results:
The RF Interference issue: I experienced it. Its like a couple faint shadow lines moving diagonally across your screen. I am not too surprised, my wall outlet power supply is very "dirty" and isn't even grounded (I get shocked from my case all the time). Plus I have 20 million fans and a neon light in my case. It seems the 9700 is just more vulnerable to RFI than my Ti4200. The interference is very slight and is _not_ visible 99% of the time. I only see it when the screen contains a large block of a certain tone of blue-ish gray. There are various things to try to get rid of the RFI and I haven't tried them yet, since I only saw the RFI twice and it wasn't enough to bother me.
Now for the good news:
The stuttering issue: I didn't see any, anywhere.
Drivers: Believe it or not, ATI's drivers don't suck anymore. Infact I think I prefer them over nVidia's drivers :eek: . They have many more options and much more tweakable. I found two programs - the alpha of a certain game (which I can't mention here) and the IG3 demo which ran fine on the 9700 but have been broken on my Ti4200 since the 40.xx drivers came out.
2D image quality: I doubted this would be noticeable but I was suprised. On my monitor text has always been slightly blurry when the desktop res was aboce 1024x768. I always figured this was my cheap monitor, but when I installed the 9700 desktop became clear and crisp. The adaptive-deinterlacing does make DVDs look better than on my Ti4200, it almost looks like the resolution of the DVD has increased.
Performance: I didn't do much benchmarking though I did a quick, unprofessional comparison in Unreal 2:
Ti4200 2xAA 2xAF 800x600 - 33 fps
9700 4xAA 4xAF 1024x768 - 42 fps
Twice the AA, twice the AF, higher res and STILL a nice performance increase. What more could you ask for? There is no doubt that the 9700 is very efficient with AA and AF. Its nice to no longer have to pick and choose between AA vs AF vs high res.
Compatibility: UT2003, Unreal 2, SoF 2, AoM, BF1942 and the alpha of a certain game that I am not allowed to mention. So far I have not encountered any compatibility problems.