Think about it, back in the day we would get great sound cards, great graphics cards and the leaps and bounds were actual leaps and bounds. Now it's like well you can play this game at 4k at 120FPS vs 60FPS.
@@C4nn15 You know when even decade + old computers with 8GB DDRII, an OC AMD Athlon II X4, a cheap SSD, and with a lowend GPU like an AMD R7 240 2GB can still run many modern titles at 720p - 1080p low settings getting 60fps, or close too it running a lightweight Linux Distro like Manjaro Mate then we have hit a peak of sorts in terms of tech IMHO! I truly don't get the excitement these days that I did back in the 80's - mid 00's seeing each leap forward in tech.
@@CommodoreFan64 My current system is from 2012 with only a GPU upgrade to a 1050 Ti, and I can _still_ play most games at decent settings, at 1080p. Granted, it's definitely time for an upgrade, but considering I've gotten _9 years_ out of this platform, it's certainly much different from how things used to be. I recently acquired a Pentium II-based IBM Aptiva, and a system like that would have been hopelessly obsolete by the time this card (Radeon 9700 Pro) would debut, despite its very high performance just five years prior.
As his wife I can verify that he did, in fact, bring the card on our vacation lol. It's so good to see all your hard work completed in such a fantastic way. This is your best video yet. 💙
I loved this video, and I loved my 9700 Pro when I bought it used in 2004. I do find it amusing that the interview clip with John Carmack had him talk about how fast the R300 could render real-time shadows, though. When Doom 3 was first released, the cards in the R300 family were under-performing until a programmer in the community realized that the driver calls for computing shadows were remarkably inefficient. He wrote a patch that replaced those instructions with more simple equivalent math, and performance increased by a VERY noticeable amount! It was so good that ATI integrated it into their next Catalyst driver revision, and it was mostly forgotten after that. I still have the file, even though it's not needed anymore unless one is using Catalyst drivers from before 4.9 or so.
Very nice video! I remember, that I desperately wanted to get a 9700 Pro, but as a student, I just didn't have the money to buy it. But there was a solution! With some luck you could modify a 9500. Shorting two contacts with a drop of electric varnish you could enable all 8 pipelines and with some overclocking get it on the level of the 9700 Pro. This was what I did eventually and I had luck. I added a better cooler and even overclocked the card over the usual 9700 Pro frequencies. I used the card for a quite long time and still think, that it was one of the biggest steps in real time 3d graphics technology. Thanks for the memories!
Same fond memories of unlocking and overclocking the snot out of my 9500. While my memory clocks were never terribly impressive my core went to the moon!
thank God someone mentioned this. Good old days! P.S. - I never had the money to afford myself those Radeon cards. But I knew about all of them and all their capabilities and possibilities. Wonderful memories.
I made the jump from a GeForce Ti4200 Golden Sample from Gainward to an ATi Radeon 9700 Pro when I built a brand new system based around the nForce 2 Ultra kitted with an Athlon XP 2500+ and 512MB of DDR1 Corsair CMX Platinum which allowed me to OC the CPU to 3200+ levels at a much lower price. The jump was incredible and I was playing all my current games at higher res on my 19" Trinitron monitor. I remember working for 3 months to save up the cash (fast food and being a teen meant minimum wage) after hearing the news of the pending release and bought the card a few weeks after release.
I still run a ati aiw 9800 pro.. Love the card and all its features.. tuner still works with a digital to analog converter and a tv antenna .. used to to convert vcr tapes to dvd.. saved family videos.. play games.. ect. ect..
Likewise, although I think the composite in has went on mine. The image is completely messed like those macrovision copy protection all the time. The rest of the card seems to work fine though, strange.
The 2002 era 9700 Pro could play games "3 years after it launched". Meanwhile most people: were playing Crysis, Timeshift, Half-Life 2 EP2, STALKER, CoD4, Gears of War, Portal, Jade Empire, Halo 2, Resident Evil 4, in 2007 and 2008, The longevity of 9700 Pro was only recently eclipsed by the RX 470/480/570/580, GTX 1060 and GTX 980 Ti.
I had it, back in the day. I remember the beast it was. It was impressive. People used to perceive it like we perceive the RTX 4090 nowadays : the Holy Grail of GPUs ^^
Oh man! The legendary 9700 pro, the card that sparked my collection addiction after I found it in a box 2 years ago. I enjoyed every minute of the video. Just Excellent in all regards 👍
This card was also one of the first cards I added to my collection a few years ago. I technically had stuff before then but I didn't consider it a collection until then.
Had a 9600xt from 2003 to 2006 and have nothing but good things to say about the card. Even when it was chugging out low frames at its end when i eventually upgraded to an x1650 pro... Love the old tech.
Aww man! Brings back fond memories! Water cooled Athlon xp 2500+ and volt modded 9700 pro on GPU and memory. I remember ripping off the voltage regulator on the back with the heat spreader in it 😢wanting to put a proper heatsink on it! I got a nice O.C from it until one day I come back to the pc in two colour mode, just black n white. CPU waterblock leaked onto my beloved Radeon!
Never had a 9000s card but always looked at them with awe...these were the best days.. unlocking driver features with tools an if you was lucky enabling extra shader pipes like was it on the 9600 to 9700pros an the 6600 from Nvidia had versions that could be turned into 6800s... I looked at my locked shaders in my 6600gt in riva tuner an wishing I could unlock them...tho my 6600gt was as quick as a stock 6800 in most stuff due to the insane clocks it had...but still those extra 8 shaders an 4 vertex shaders would of been a treat...an the fact they was physically on my chip made me cry
I was fresh out of high school when this came out, this was the card I always wanted but could never afford back then. I believe every computer nerd has that one piece of hardware they always wanted to get but couldn't afford at the time. Mine was the 9700 Pro. Nearly 20 years later, I finally put a 9800 pro in a 2003-2004 era P4 rig. Thing shreds...
I was just entering high school at this point and remember how the 9500 Pro was the overclocking champion, the 9700 NP (non-Pro) could be modded/overclocked to insane levels, and the 9800 Pro couldn't be beaten by NV even once they finally showed up to the party. I wish I hadn't thrown out the cards I had back then ("those slow old things haven't been relevant in years, why do I hoard this junk" mentality) but I have rebuilt my collection with a 9500 Pro, 9800 Pro, as well as X1950 XT and FX 5950 Ultra (always wanted one but they were too expensive). Fortunately I still have the same computer as I did then. I keep my 5600 Ultra in there to keep the power supply load easy (this is when PSUs had a max output of about what my 3080 pulls) with the same 60 GB WD hard drive though I have maxed the board out at 1 GB of RAM (up from 128MB) and it has Windows 7 because back then it was amazing how it could run on "only" 1GB of RAM. Back before Roku sticks this was my streaming machine once its duties as gaming machine were retired.
I get sentimental with this, what a greatly put video. The fact that you can still use this card on Windows 11 is just nuts. The official Vista 64bit drivers works when you install them through Device manager just fine. The die shrink (RV370) of this on PCIe (X600) runs even on my modern AM5 PC with CSM enabled, connected to my LG 4K OLED TV through DVItoHDMI adapter. Yes, it DOES RUN CRYSIS. Revolutionary chip indeed. It's such a nostalgic feeling to have this working on my main PC, playing the classic games I had on my first PC that I got on my 10th birthday.
This is a great video! I personally have it's slightly-stronger sibling the 9800 Pro, and it was absolutely wild to play with a card that put NVIDIA *below* ATI, something that now-a-days is just a pipedream! I need to rebuild my Socket 754 machine and get that card back up and running ASAP.
I had the Geforce2 Ti when Battlefield 1942 came out. I got low fps and stuttering no matter how low the settings. Upgraded to the 9700 pro and wow. BF142 on med to high settings, zero fps drops or stuttering. 9700 pro is 1 of the best gpu's I owned.
Back in the days i couldn´t afford the Radeon 9700 so i waited for Radeon 9500. I bought a Gigabyte Maya II and it was quite good. The Omega Driver set the 9500 on Fire... it was awesome.
This was a remarkable product to be a part of working on - I spent many hours developing pre-silicon verification tests, and then later on driver optimizations, including for Doom, as well as the adaptive anti-aliasing technology. I felt incredibly fortunate to get the chance to work on it.
@David Bolha i tried to unlock mine with modified ATI drivers. While it did work and I was able to get extra pipelines working, there were artifacts on screen. For instance, I'd have a mesh of equally spqced rectangles on the screen along with visible video distortion.
I remember going from my GF4 Ti4600 to the 9700 Pro when it launched and being in awe at how much faster it was. Even more so as the drivers developed.
I also have very fond memorys of the card. In fact, it is the only ATI/AMD Card i have ever used (as in my top tier system) in all of my years of PC (Gaming), apart from the Rage 2+ in my first PC. Coming from a originally-not-so-shabby Geforce 2 Ultra, i was amazed by its DX9 graphics and, thanks to its wide design, the ease it seemed to have running all titles at high resolutions with anisotropic filtering and even FSAA. i dont know how many hours i clocked in elder scrolls III morrowind with it, must have been easily four-digit... like you, later i moved on to a 6800 GT to feed that sparkling new 1680*1050pixel TFT on my desk, but even than it still didnt felt like a completely outdated card and was still able to run new titles (with a bit more modest quality settings) until the DX10 age came around.
This video was legendary. A perfect tribute to an awesome piece of hardware. I couldn't be happier to support this channel considering the kind and form of content it brings. On another note, this video will be a great reference for my own next week. If the big brother and the little brother out to battle next week had a middle sister, it would be the Radeon 9700 pro. Thanks for your work!
These were such a great times for computer technology to evolve. In fact then we could really see revolution with almost every generation of hardware. Something like this can not happen today. Pity. My colleague had 9800Pro and it was a BLAST on our whole neighbourhood. Nothing could compete with that monster at that time.
The performance benefit of the 9700 Pro was massive in comparison to the 8500LE that I had before it. My 9700 Pro was the AIW version. I had to get the AIW as the regular 9700 Pro was not in stock at the time. Computer stores in my area couldn't keep them in stock due to their popularity. They were also creaming FX series GPU's from nVidia. It was only when the 6800 GT came out that I replaced my 9700 Pro AIW with it, when VRAM was now becoming a focal point of future gaming.
Oooh, I had one of these, bought to play Far Cry. It had a giant Zalman passive heatsink on it. It cooked itself. I replaced it to a 8800GTS to play Crysis, and it cooked itself. After some years with midrange stuff, I got a GTX 970 to play DOOM 2016. Put giant superadvanced Arctic cooling on it so it does not cook. ... it cooked itself.
I remember buying an FX5600 and selling it 3 days later, blowing my entire salary on a Radeon 9700 - worth it. My last R300 was also my first iGPU (Radeon 200Xpress). I never owned a dGPU again.
Back in those days I had a 9500 Pro which was the 9700 Pro's slower but still quite capable brother. It was amazing to see what that card could do, especially compared to the Radeon 8500 & Radeon DDR cards I had owned before the 9500 Pro. I was crushed when my PC was damaged as part of my divorce in late 2005. I was able to salvage the rest of the machine but sadly the 9500 Pro never worked again.
The leap in performance at the time was stellar, the drivers were relatively crap though when compared with nVidia detonator drivers. it ran so hot too.
I remember playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on an old family computer with ATI 9000 series cards. A P4 1.7ghz that I upgraded to 2ghz. Socket 423. COD 4 was 5yrs after those cards releases.
Yeah, had 9200 at that time, but few years later bought x800gto which gave huge boost in speed and quality. But later x1800XT made me sad, its died in a year. But still I loved ATI products and had my hands on 2600Pro, 4600M, 4800, 6800, R7 270, R9 390, RX 470.
@@davidbolha I probably have all the info and data backed up on CD's on the other side of the country. Wouldn't be able to tell you exactly right now, it was a relatively simple process though. Notable 3dMark 2001 improvement at the time.
Was part of the verification team at ATI in Markham for the R300 (Khan). It was a BEAST, it stretched all our tools and processes trying to fit, but we got it done. Still remember some of the issues that were discovered. This video brought back alot of memories, thanks!
Radeon 9800 XT is when things got really good. Also something really cool, ArtX designed the GPU on the Gamecube and since ATI bought them once the design was done the Gamecube GPU is 100 percent ArtX design. The Gamecube TEV was all them. Amazing.
I had a 9500pro I got from a friend for free. I benched that against an Nvidia FX5900xt and while the 5900 won, it was not by much. I even had fun and installed the bios from a 9700 in that 9500pro just for the heck of it. When it ran it displayed 9700, fun times back then.
I had a nVidia Leadtek WinFast GeForce 4 Ti 4400 or 4600 don't remember exactly. With Athlon XP 2500+ overclocked to about 3200+ EpoX motherboard or the nForce motherboard because I had tried both boards (and more) don't remember exactly. Then I got the Sapphire 9800 Pro 128Mb I had flashed to a 9800XT just for device manager glory & boot up recognition although moment of owning it was the top dog before XT. I still have some of this stuff in my garage. I remember this was the time when PC market strated to boom with fancy hardware & cases to choose from. I had by the time the ThermalTake Xaser II 6000A aluminium finish that had swapped already many hardware AMD combos with many nVIDIA cards & the ATi card mentioned above. Now btw I had built a modern PC in that case for my self the 2070 Super fitted very tightly can be found on my channel. The second built 2080 Super PC that has the new Phanteks Enthoo Evolv X Mid-Tower Galaxy Silver case with Corsair 150Pro AIO for CPU, 128Gb DDR4, Xeon 2678 @ 3.3Ghz TurboUnlock on all 12 cores.
I had one back than but it was Radeon 9500 (4 pipes with 256bit memory - L patern) unlocked to 9700 (8 pipes) via OMEGA drivers, but when unlocked it was unable to reach 325MHz clock, but at all it was really nice thing for free.
Nice, I had the good fortune to live through this time as a PC enthusiast. I didn't get the 9700 Pro, instead I went for the 9700 and flashed the bios and turned it into a PRO
Ati truly knocked out Nvidia, with r300 series Nvidia were stunned and confused for hole generation of cards. 9700pro was and still is beast, to bad its almost extinct, its rare to find it in working condition. Just technology leap from 1999 i had TnT2 and 2002 , 9700 was introduced what technology bump. Shout out to to 3DGameMan :) Great video, thanks
I remember going from a heavily modified and overclocked Nvidia GeForce 4 4400, to a heavily modified and overclocked Sapphire ATi Radeon 9800 Pro when my roommate upgraded to a Sapphire ATi Radeon X850 Pro (that he pretty much instantly modified and overclocked) and was blown away at how huge the difference was not only in performance, but over all picture and rendering quality. ATi was absolutely killing it, and even as Nvidia started catching back up and eeking back their performance lead, their picture and render quality still lagged behind side by side. This being the era of the CRT still, ATi was better at both its 3d rendering and all of the digital side, while providing superior clarity, color reproduction and overall analog performance as well. This to me, was the most fun time in the computer industry as a whole.
I had in my possession one of the Sapphire version of this card with the passive heatsink. Some years ago we built a computer for family member who didnt have a computer at the time and It was decided that we would give them this graphics card. I was against the idea but the 9700 pro belonged to my dad who didnt really understand the whole obesession with old hardware... we havent seen or heard anything about that computer since and every time i see anything about a 9700 pro - I cry a little inside. Unfortunately the card wasnt mine so i couldnt decide its fate and I repeatedly told my dad that it was going to be worth quite a few bucks one day...
I had a 9800 non-pro 128MB card I bought new from Newegg back in late 2003 (early 2004? not sure). It was a Sapphire OEM non-retail card. Installed a Zalman cooler and overclocked that sucker to 9800XT speeds. Used it for several years with an Althon XP system until it sadly died sometime around 2007 or so. I currently have a 9800XT 256MB card that I use for retro gaming and geez it is a beast for it's time. Capable of playing Crysis... just barely.
When Doom 3 alpha leaked (late 2002), the average graphics cards at the time could only run it as a slideshow at low-medium settings... this card could run it just fine at high quality.
The first PC upgrade I convinced my dad of was a Radeon 9600 SE - I had heard about the legendary 9700 Pro but was too young to know what a 64-bit memory bus meant and how cut down that card was compared to its bigger brother. Later I referred to the card as the 9600 Sucky Edition lol. Funny now looking back at that with the recent 6500XT 64-bit bus controversy!
I went to CompUSA(remember them?) and they didn't have any 9700 Pros in stock, so I headed over to Best Buy and they had ONE left. I brought it home to replace my 8500 and was blown away by the speed. It was so fast that it was CPU limited. When I replaced my CPU the next year my minimum FPS went up a ton. Eventually replaced it with a 6800 GT which was faster but not nearly as cool.
Gotta hand it to ATI/AMD: When they find a basic architecture that works, they stick with it and only move on when they've truly hit a wall that can't be beaten by either fattening up the architecture or speeding it up. The basic R300 design was carried through to the X1000 series, only being replaced in mid 2008 by Terascale. Terascale (after a big misstep in the HD2000 series) lasted the entire DX10 Era and was in the high end until 2012. And GCN, oh GCN: it's still punching well above it's weight almost TEN YEARS post release, and will probably continue to do so for a few more years thanks to AMD planning to port their DLSS competitor to Vega (GCN 5) and Polaris (GCN 4) . Even the 7970 (GCN 1) still more than delivers the goods if you're willing to tweak settings in modern AAA games (3 GB is just enough if you're careful with your settings). Realistically if you still have a midrange to top end GCN card in your system, you're still good to go until the current stupidity with GPU prices end (unless you have a GCN 1 card and you want to play a DX12 only game). Try doing that with a nVidia card from 2012.
ATi: your confidence is your weakness Nvidia: And the faith in your cards is yours And with directX 10 Ati went from original trilogy to Disney trilogy.
Nostalgia. My first Radeon, and the first ATI card to surpass Nvidia's cards. This and the 9800 Pro released a bit later were _the_ GPUs with which to play Half-Life 2.
Oh yeah.. the 9700pro was the single most extended use video card I ever had. Used it for many years. I still have it in the box on the shelf too. Loved Pipe Dream! I still have that installed on my current computers. It even runs, and looks amazing 🤩, with my Nvidia 3d vision monitor and glasses setup.
A bit late to the party, but this vid had me looking over my small gpu collection...I pulled the 9700 out and admired the job I did putting heatsinks on everything, and the artic-cooling silencer that replaced the original hsf....also took a look at the x800 pro I'd flashed to XT (successfully btw), and that one has a big copper Zalman hsf on it....thanks for the memories.
My very first power gaming system I built had this as a component. DFI LANParty nForce2 motherboard 4 x 256MB DDR Corsair AMD 3200+ processor ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card
My first really expensive display card that I bought in 2003 was Radeon 9700 non-Pro. It cost 300€ if I remember right. Flashed it immediately to Pro -model and later overclocked beyond that with Vmods and Zalman VF700 copper-cooler. I still have that exact same card, amog with 9800Pro and 9800XT that I got later.
So this video's the reason all the 9700s are expensive right now! XD Great video, Nathan! I, too, could only ever dream of owning one of these beasts back in the day.
I loved my 9700 pro. A Hercules 3D Prophet. With a blue PCB. When the cruddy little fan by Hercules died after a few months I bolted an Arctic Cooling Silencer onto it. It still works as well, which is getting quite rare for AGP cards from that era. Though I'm not quite sure if it's more revolutionary then for example a Voodoo, Riva TNT, Geforce256, or later the Geforce 8 / Radeon 2000. Especially the latter were a big revolution, with the introduction of true parallelisation with unified shaders and such.
![BOWKYLION - วิงวอน (ex-change) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cLdnZWDaO-w/mqdefault.jpg)
Fantastic video! The 9700 Pro is one of my favourite graphics cards and it was such an exciting time compared to what we get these days...
Think about it, back in the day we would get great sound cards, great graphics cards and the leaps and bounds were actual leaps and bounds. Now it's like well you can play this game at 4k at 120FPS vs 60FPS.
@@C4nn15 You know when even decade + old computers with 8GB DDRII, an OC AMD Athlon II X4, a cheap SSD, and with a lowend GPU like an AMD R7 240 2GB can still run many modern titles at 720p - 1080p low settings getting 60fps, or close too it running a lightweight Linux Distro like Manjaro Mate then we have hit a peak of sorts in terms of tech IMHO!
I truly don't get the excitement these days that I did back in the 80's - mid 00's seeing each leap forward in tech.
That was an exciting year indeed
@@CommodoreFan64 My current system is from 2012 with only a GPU upgrade to a 1050 Ti, and I can _still_ play most games at decent settings, at 1080p. Granted, it's definitely time for an upgrade, but considering I've gotten _9 years_ out of this platform, it's certainly much different from how things used to be.
I recently acquired a Pentium II-based IBM Aptiva, and a system like that would have been hopelessly obsolete by the time this card (Radeon 9700 Pro) would debut, despite its very high performance just five years prior.
No the 9500 pro with a bios of 9700pro.
That is the card .
I had one with a aftermarket cooling like a blower.
Thing overtune like shit.
As his wife I can verify that he did, in fact, bring the card on our vacation lol.
It's so good to see all your hard work completed in such a fantastic way. This is your best video yet. 💙
I agree this is some of his best stuff but he doesn't upload anymore :(
I loved this video, and I loved my 9700 Pro when I bought it used in 2004. I do find it amusing that the interview clip with John Carmack had him talk about how fast the R300 could render real-time shadows, though. When Doom 3 was first released, the cards in the R300 family were under-performing until a programmer in the community realized that the driver calls for computing shadows were remarkably inefficient. He wrote a patch that replaced those instructions with more simple equivalent math, and performance increased by a VERY noticeable amount! It was so good that ATI integrated it into their next Catalyst driver revision, and it was mostly forgotten after that. I still have the file, even though it's not needed anymore unless one is using Catalyst drivers from before 4.9 or so.
Very nice video! I remember, that I desperately wanted to get a 9700 Pro, but as a student, I just didn't have the money to buy it. But there was a solution! With some luck you could modify a 9500. Shorting two contacts with a drop of electric varnish you could enable all 8 pipelines and with some overclocking get it on the level of the 9700 Pro. This was what I did eventually and I had luck. I added a better cooler and even overclocked the card over the usual 9700 Pro frequencies. I used the card for a quite long time and still think, that it was one of the biggest steps in real time 3d graphics technology.
Thanks for the memories!
Same fond memories of unlocking and overclocking the snot out of my 9500. While my memory clocks were never terribly impressive my core went to the moon!
thank God someone mentioned this. Good old days!
P.S. - I never had the money to afford myself those Radeon cards. But I knew about all of them and all their capabilities and possibilities. Wonderful memories.
I made the jump from a GeForce Ti4200 Golden Sample from Gainward to an ATi Radeon 9700 Pro when I built a brand new system based around the nForce 2 Ultra kitted with an Athlon XP 2500+ and 512MB of DDR1 Corsair CMX Platinum which allowed me to OC the CPU to 3200+ levels at a much lower price. The jump was incredible and I was playing all my current games at higher res on my 19" Trinitron monitor. I remember working for 3 months to save up the cash (fast food and being a teen meant minimum wage) after hearing the news of the pending release and bought the card a few weeks after release.
I still run a ati aiw 9800 pro.. Love the card and all its features.. tuner still works with a digital to analog converter and a tv antenna .. used to to convert vcr tapes to dvd.. saved family videos.. play games.. ect. ect..
Likewise, although I think the composite in has went on mine. The image is completely messed like those macrovision copy protection all the time. The rest of the card seems to work fine though, strange.
@@gen_angry that stinks.. It is heart breaking when they finally give out..
03:15 I just found exactly that heatsink some days ago in a box somehow. I loved that era when these cards came out.
The 2002 era 9700 Pro could play games "3 years after it launched".
Meanwhile most people: were playing Crysis, Timeshift, Half-Life 2 EP2, STALKER, CoD4, Gears of War, Portal, Jade Empire, Halo 2, Resident Evil 4, in 2007 and 2008,
The longevity of 9700 Pro was only recently eclipsed by the RX 470/480/570/580, GTX 1060 and GTX 980 Ti.
Yep nowadays it's expected
Just seeing Mr Rodney Reynolds back in a video again takes me back. Very nice and in-depth video look at the good'ol 9700 pro
I had it, back in the day. I remember the beast it was. It was impressive. People used to perceive it like we perceive the RTX 4090 nowadays : the Holy Grail of GPUs ^^
I had both a 9700 and a 9800 Pro they were fantastic graphics cards and ones I won't soon forget. I miss those times.
I had the GeForce 4 Ti4200 when the 9700 Pro was out. I got the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128Mb the year after. Monster!
Oh man! The legendary 9700 pro, the card that sparked my collection addiction after I found it in a box 2 years ago. I enjoyed every minute of the video. Just Excellent in all regards 👍
This card was also one of the first cards I added to my collection a few years ago. I technically had stuff before then but I didn't consider it a collection until then.
I ended up buying one on Ebay... you guys were telling the truth!
Had a 9600xt from 2003 to 2006 and have nothing but good things to say about the card. Even when it was chugging out low frames at its end when i eventually upgraded to an x1650 pro... Love the old tech.
Loved UT2003 with my Northwood P4 2500MHZ@2800MZH, 256MB and the 9700pro. I think I payed about 480 Euros back in 2002. Golden Times...
Aww man! Brings back fond memories! Water cooled Athlon xp 2500+ and volt modded 9700 pro on GPU and memory. I remember ripping off the voltage regulator on the back with the heat spreader in it 😢wanting to put a proper heatsink on it! I got a nice O.C from it until one day I come back to the pc in two colour mode, just black n white. CPU waterblock leaked onto my beloved Radeon!
So happy I have one of these in my collection, with the shim removed so it'll hopefully last.
Shim removal is a must, for sure
Excellent video. And I love that I got to see Rodney Reynolds recommend another Kickass product just a few minutes in. That earns a sub. Thanks dude.
I had the Radeon 9700 TX, a special version of the 9700 that was Dell OEM. That card was so awesome for it’s time.
My day was genuinely made brighter when I saw this pop up after a long day. Thanks!
Never had a 9000s card but always looked at them with awe...these were the best days.. unlocking driver features with tools an if you was lucky enabling extra shader pipes like was it on the 9600 to 9700pros an the 6600 from Nvidia had versions that could be turned into 6800s... I looked at my locked shaders in my 6600gt in riva tuner an wishing I could unlock them...tho my 6600gt was as quick as a stock 6800 in most stuff due to the insane clocks it had...but still those extra 8 shaders an 4 vertex shaders would of been a treat...an the fact they was physically on my chip made me cry
I had the ATI X9800Pro 256megs of ram with Quad pump DDR3.
That card was outstanding.
I was fresh out of high school when this came out, this was the card I always wanted but could never afford back then. I believe every computer nerd has that one piece of hardware they always wanted to get but couldn't afford at the time. Mine was the 9700 Pro. Nearly 20 years later, I finally put a 9800 pro in a 2003-2004 era P4 rig. Thing shreds...
I was just entering high school at this point and remember how the 9500 Pro was the overclocking champion, the 9700 NP (non-Pro) could be modded/overclocked to insane levels, and the 9800 Pro couldn't be beaten by NV even once they finally showed up to the party. I wish I hadn't thrown out the cards I had back then ("those slow old things haven't been relevant in years, why do I hoard this junk" mentality) but I have rebuilt my collection with a 9500 Pro, 9800 Pro, as well as X1950 XT and FX 5950 Ultra (always wanted one but they were too expensive). Fortunately I still have the same computer as I did then. I keep my 5600 Ultra in there to keep the power supply load easy (this is when PSUs had a max output of about what my 3080 pulls) with the same 60 GB WD hard drive though I have maxed the board out at 1 GB of RAM (up from 128MB) and it has Windows 7 because back then it was amazing how it could run on "only" 1GB of RAM. Back before Roku sticks this was my streaming machine once its duties as gaming machine were retired.
I got at least 8 years out of mine. My lads had use of the last 3, sold on eBay eventually as a fully working card. Excellent product.
I get sentimental with this, what a greatly put video. The fact that you can still use this card on Windows 11 is just nuts. The official Vista 64bit drivers works when you install them through Device manager just fine.
The die shrink (RV370) of this on PCIe (X600) runs even on my modern AM5 PC with CSM enabled, connected to my LG 4K OLED TV through DVItoHDMI adapter. Yes, it DOES RUN CRYSIS. Revolutionary chip indeed. It's such a nostalgic feeling to have this working on my main PC, playing the classic games I had on my first PC that I got on my 10th birthday.
This is a great video! I personally have it's slightly-stronger sibling the 9800 Pro, and it was absolutely wild to play with a card that put NVIDIA *below* ATI, something that now-a-days is just a pipedream! I need to rebuild my Socket 754 machine and get that card back up and running ASAP.
I had the Geforce2 Ti when Battlefield 1942 came out. I got low fps and stuttering no matter how low the settings. Upgraded to the 9700 pro and wow. BF142 on med to high settings, zero fps drops or stuttering. 9700 pro is 1 of the best gpu's I owned.
Back in the days i couldn´t afford the Radeon 9700 so i waited for Radeon 9500. I bought a Gigabyte Maya II and it was quite good. The Omega Driver set the 9500 on Fire... it was awesome.
This was a remarkable product to be a part of working on - I spent many hours developing pre-silicon verification tests, and then later on driver optimizations, including for Doom, as well as the adaptive anti-aliasing technology. I felt incredibly fortunate to get the chance to work on it.
You helped create something truly influential!
Had a 9800Pro for a couple of years. Marvelous GPU. Bring my 2004 back...
I had the 9800 pro! To this day! My all time favorite card! Special card for a special time! Far cry!
Yes the 9700 was truly a milestone in gpu history i remember reading magazines about it i was so baffled by its specs back then
This was such a huge step in performance!
Beast of a card back in 2000 I remember always trying to beat 3dmark scores on it over clocking it
This card was so special to me! The 9800 pro ati was the first high end card I ever bought!
I remember the day i got my 9700 pro... the speed of that thing absolutely blew me away.
Back in my old days, I started with Riva TNT2 64, and then moving up to GeForce MX 440, and finally made a huge jump to this 9700 Pro.
I had a Radeon 9500 in my computer. Sadly, it couldn't be modded into 9500 Pro but it was still an amazing card.
I had/have a 9500 Pro & remember unlocking it with Kip Hardina's Warp11 BIOS... 🤔😊😄
@David Bolha i tried to unlock mine with modified ATI drivers. While it did work and I was able to get extra pipelines working, there were artifacts on screen. For instance, I'd have a mesh of equally spqced rectangles on the screen along with visible video distortion.
I remember going from my GF4 Ti4600 to the 9700 Pro when it launched and being in awe at how much faster it was. Even more so as the drivers developed.
I also have very fond memorys of the card. In fact, it is the only ATI/AMD Card i have ever used (as in my top tier system) in all of my years of PC (Gaming), apart from the Rage 2+ in my first PC.
Coming from a originally-not-so-shabby Geforce 2 Ultra, i was amazed by its DX9 graphics and, thanks to its wide design, the ease it seemed to have running all titles at high resolutions with anisotropic filtering and even FSAA. i dont know how many hours i clocked in elder scrolls III morrowind with it, must have been easily four-digit...
like you, later i moved on to a 6800 GT to feed that sparkling new 1680*1050pixel TFT on my desk, but even than it still didnt felt like a completely outdated card and was still able to run new titles (with a bit more modest quality settings) until the DX10 age came around.
Excellent video, thoroughly enjoyed watching this! :)
This video was legendary. A perfect tribute to an awesome piece of hardware. I couldn't be happier to support this channel considering the kind and form of content it brings. On another note, this video will be a great reference for my own next week. If the big brother and the little brother out to battle next week had a middle sister, it would be the Radeon 9700 pro. Thanks for your work!
These were such a great times for computer technology to evolve. In fact then we could really see revolution with almost every generation of hardware. Something like this can not happen today. Pity. My colleague had 9800Pro and it was a BLAST on our whole neighbourhood. Nothing could compete with that monster at that time.
Voodoo5 5500 required external power in 2000 in fact it need more then the 9700 and used a full Molex connector
You are right and I got this wrong.
I had a 4200ti, the 9700pro was a beast for sure. I wish I still had the spare cash to be into PC building again. They were the best days of my life.
Stellar narration man!
Thank you!
The performance benefit of the 9700 Pro was massive in comparison to the 8500LE that I had before it. My 9700 Pro was the AIW version. I had to get the AIW as the regular 9700 Pro was not in stock at the time. Computer stores in my area couldn't keep them in stock due to their popularity. They were also creaming FX series GPU's from nVidia. It was only when the 6800 GT came out that I replaced my 9700 Pro AIW with it, when VRAM was now becoming a focal point of future gaming.
I like this video style, you are best teacher, good work!
I remember my 9800 pro with the so good expérience with antialiasing and lasting performance!!!!
A historic Card, that shall always Stay in out Memory!
Oooh, I had one of these, bought to play Far Cry. It had a giant Zalman passive heatsink on it. It cooked itself.
I replaced it to a 8800GTS to play Crysis, and it cooked itself.
After some years with midrange stuff, I got a GTX 970 to play DOOM 2016. Put giant superadvanced Arctic cooling on it so it does not cook.
... it cooked itself.
I remember buying an FX5600 and selling it 3 days later, blowing my entire salary on a Radeon 9700 - worth it. My last R300 was also my first iGPU (Radeon 200Xpress). I never owned a dGPU again.
Wow what a great video!
I really like 9000 series cards from ATI, i owned the Radeon 9550 before and it was a great budget card.
My first ATI card! Coming from the 3Dfx Voodoo 3, I could not fathom going Nvidia. My 9700 Pro has it's own place on my shelf next to my Voodoo cards.
The cinematography in this episode is simply amazing , wonderful video! Also I learned the 9700 Pro Released on my birthday .
Back in those days I had a 9500 Pro which was the 9700 Pro's slower but still quite capable brother. It was amazing to see what that card could do, especially compared to the Radeon 8500 & Radeon DDR cards I had owned before the 9500 Pro. I was crushed when my PC was damaged as part of my divorce in late 2005. I was able to salvage the rest of the machine but sadly the 9500 Pro never worked again.
Still own one, amazing jump in performance over previos gemerations!
I wish AMD hadn't retired the ATI brand. I miss that red logo.
To be fair to AMD, they hung onto it for another 4 years after the takeover. But yeah, I was sad when it just became AMD.
the Canadian ati office is still located in Markham ON of course with AMD signs now a days but at least the original Headquarters is still around
The leap in performance at the time was stellar, the drivers were relatively crap though when compared with nVidia detonator drivers. it ran so hot too.
I remember playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on an old family computer with ATI 9000 series cards. A P4 1.7ghz that I upgraded to 2ghz. Socket 423. COD 4 was 5yrs after those cards releases.
Yeah, had 9200 at that time, but few years later bought x800gto which gave huge boost in speed and quality. But later x1800XT made me sad, its died in a year. But still I loved ATI products and had my hands on 2600Pro, 4600M, 4800, 6800, R7 270, R9 390, RX 470.
Good to see Radeon 9700 Pro taking vacations and enjoying retirement.
Didn't have a 9700 pro but did have a soft modded 9500 pro It was awesome
With Kip Hardina's Warp11 BIOS ? 🤔🙄
@@davidbolha I probably have all the info and data backed up on CD's on the other side of the country. Wouldn't be able to tell you exactly right now, it was a relatively simple process though. Notable 3dMark 2001 improvement at the time.
Was part of the verification team at ATI in Markham for the R300 (Khan). It was a BEAST, it stretched all our tools and processes trying to fit, but we got it done. Still remember some of the issues that were discovered. This video brought back alot of memories, thanks!
Radeon 9800 XT is when things got really good.
Also something really cool, ArtX designed the GPU on the Gamecube and since ATI bought them once the design was done the Gamecube GPU is 100 percent ArtX design. The Gamecube TEV was all them. Amazing.
@4:20 I LOVED playing Dungeon Siege games! still have original box in storage :D
I had a 9500pro I got from a friend for free. I benched that against an Nvidia FX5900xt and while the 5900 won, it was not by much. I even had fun and installed the bios from a 9700 in that 9500pro just for the heck of it. When it ran it displayed 9700, fun times back then.
I had a nVidia Leadtek WinFast GeForce 4 Ti 4400 or 4600 don't remember exactly. With Athlon XP 2500+ overclocked to about 3200+ EpoX motherboard or the nForce motherboard because I had tried both boards (and more) don't remember exactly. Then I got the Sapphire 9800 Pro 128Mb I had flashed to a 9800XT just for device manager glory & boot up recognition although moment of owning it was the top dog before XT. I still have some of this stuff in my garage. I remember this was the time when PC market strated to boom with fancy hardware & cases to choose from. I had by the time the ThermalTake Xaser II 6000A aluminium finish that had swapped already many hardware AMD combos with many nVIDIA cards & the ATi card mentioned above. Now btw I had built a modern PC in that case for my self the 2070 Super fitted very tightly can be found on my channel. The second built 2080 Super PC that has the new Phanteks Enthoo Evolv X Mid-Tower Galaxy Silver case with Corsair 150Pro AIO for CPU, 128Gb DDR4, Xeon 2678 @ 3.3Ghz TurboUnlock on all 12 cores.
I had one back than but it was Radeon 9500 (4 pipes with 256bit memory - L patern) unlocked to 9700 (8 pipes) via OMEGA drivers, but when unlocked it was unable to reach 325MHz clock, but at all it was really nice thing for free.
Nice, I had the good fortune to live through this time as a PC enthusiast. I didn't get the 9700 Pro, instead I went for the 9700 and flashed the bios and turned it into a PRO
Ati truly knocked out Nvidia, with r300 series Nvidia were stunned and confused for hole generation of cards.
9700pro was and still is beast, to bad its almost extinct, its rare to find it in working condition.
Just technology leap from 1999 i had TnT2 and 2002 , 9700 was introduced what technology bump.
Shout out to to 3DGameMan :)
Great video, thanks
Thanks for pinup and to bring old GPU to vacation and shoot some scenes is just great.
I remember going from a heavily modified and overclocked Nvidia GeForce 4 4400, to a heavily modified and overclocked Sapphire ATi Radeon 9800 Pro when my roommate upgraded to a Sapphire ATi Radeon X850 Pro (that he pretty much instantly modified and overclocked) and was blown away at how huge the difference was not only in performance, but over all picture and rendering quality. ATi was absolutely killing it, and even as Nvidia started catching back up and eeking back their performance lead, their picture and render quality still lagged behind side by side. This being the era of the CRT still, ATi was better at both its 3d rendering and all of the digital side, while providing superior clarity, color reproduction and overall analog performance as well. This to me, was the most fun time in the computer industry as a whole.
I had in my possession one of the Sapphire version of this card with the passive heatsink. Some years ago we built a computer for family member who didnt have a computer at the time and It was decided that we would give them this graphics card.
I was against the idea but the 9700 pro belonged to my dad who didnt really understand the whole obesession with old hardware... we havent seen or heard anything about that computer since and every time i see anything about a 9700 pro - I cry a little inside. Unfortunately the card wasnt mine so i couldnt decide its fate and I repeatedly told my dad that it was going to be worth quite a few bucks one day...
That Intro! Memories :)
Wherever you live, you're lucky to have so many beautiful forests to explore. I bet there's probably some caverns too to look at.
That's not where I live. Me and the 9700 Pro did some traveling together.
@@PixelPipes Ah, gotcha. Still a beautiful place you traveled to.
I had a 9800 non-pro 128MB card I bought new from Newegg back in late 2003 (early 2004? not sure). It was a Sapphire OEM non-retail card. Installed a Zalman cooler and overclocked that sucker to 9800XT speeds. Used it for several years with an Althon XP system until it sadly died sometime around 2007 or so. I currently have a 9800XT 256MB card that I use for retro gaming and geez it is a beast for it's time. Capable of playing Crysis... just barely.
When Doom 3 alpha leaked (late 2002), the average graphics cards at the time could only run it as a slideshow at low-medium settings...
this card could run it just fine at high quality.
4:09 Rodney! We miss you!
The first PC upgrade I convinced my dad of was a Radeon 9600 SE - I had heard about the legendary 9700 Pro but was too young to know what a 64-bit memory bus meant and how cut down that card was compared to its bigger brother. Later I referred to the card as the 9600 Sucky Edition lol. Funny now looking back at that with the recent 6500XT 64-bit bus controversy!
I had one of these…I wish I hadn’t thrown so much of my stuff away, but it was just outdated hardware back then.
I went to CompUSA(remember them?) and they didn't have any 9700 Pros in stock, so I headed over to Best Buy and they had ONE left. I brought it home to replace my 8500 and was blown away by the speed. It was so fast that it was CPU limited. When I replaced my CPU the next year my minimum FPS went up a ton. Eventually replaced it with a 6800 GT which was faster but not nearly as cool.
This is a kickass product! Man it has been years since I've seen 3DGameMan.
I was thinking that too! Gooood times man.
Same, and I hope he's doing well, he is a true OG in the video review space.
Oh man I recognize the music, that was a great tech demo.
Gotta hand it to ATI/AMD: When they find a basic architecture that works, they stick with it and only move on when they've truly hit a wall that can't be beaten by either fattening up the architecture or speeding it up. The basic R300 design was carried through to the X1000 series, only being replaced in mid 2008 by Terascale. Terascale (after a big misstep in the HD2000 series) lasted the entire DX10 Era and was in the high end until 2012. And GCN, oh GCN: it's still punching well above it's weight almost TEN YEARS post release, and will probably continue to do so for a few more years thanks to AMD planning to port their DLSS competitor to Vega (GCN 5) and Polaris (GCN 4) . Even the 7970 (GCN 1) still more than delivers the goods if you're willing to tweak settings in modern AAA games (3 GB is just enough if you're careful with your settings). Realistically if you still have a midrange to top end GCN card in your system, you're still good to go until the current stupidity with GPU prices end (unless you have a GCN 1 card and you want to play a DX12 only game). Try doing that with a nVidia card from 2012.
ATi: your confidence is your weakness
Nvidia: And the faith in your cards is yours
And with directX 10 Ati went from original trilogy to Disney trilogy.
Nostalgia. My first Radeon, and the first ATI card to surpass Nvidia's cards. This and the 9800 Pro released a bit later were _the_ GPUs with which to play Half-Life 2.
Oh yeah.. the 9700pro was the single most extended use video card I ever had. Used it for many years. I still have it in the box on the shelf too. Loved Pipe Dream! I still have that installed on my current computers. It even runs, and looks amazing 🤩, with my Nvidia 3d vision monitor and glasses setup.
A bit late to the party, but this vid had me looking over my small gpu collection...I pulled the 9700 out and admired the job I did putting heatsinks on everything, and the artic-cooling silencer that replaced the original hsf....also took a look at the x800 pro I'd flashed to XT (successfully btw), and that one has a big copper Zalman hsf on it....thanks for the memories.
3:09 Oh, wow - that texturing on the waterfall looks incred... oh. lol
My very first power gaming system I built had this as a component.
DFI LANParty nForce2 motherboard
4 x 256MB DDR Corsair
AMD 3200+ processor
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card
My first really expensive display card that I bought in 2003 was Radeon 9700 non-Pro. It cost 300€ if I remember right. Flashed it immediately to Pro -model and later overclocked beyond that with Vmods and Zalman VF700 copper-cooler. I still have that exact same card, amog with 9800Pro and 9800XT that I got later.
"What would surprise everyone is the longevity"
ATI FineWine *TM* technology
So this video's the reason all the 9700s are expensive right now! XD
Great video, Nathan! I, too, could only ever dream of owning one of these beasts back in the day.
More to do with failure rate and the other videos over the last 3-4 years. Mine died the day after watching this video :\
@@classic_jam Oh no! : (
wish i still had mine. i went from a voodoo 3 3500 to a 9700pro and kept it till i eventually upgrading to a 6600gt
9700Pro - showed up in my dreams countless times back in the highschool days ;)
That GPU has done more travelling that I have during this Covid pandemic
I loved my 9700 pro. A Hercules 3D Prophet. With a blue PCB. When the cruddy little fan by Hercules died after a few months I bolted an Arctic Cooling Silencer onto it. It still works as well, which is getting quite rare for AGP cards from that era.
Though I'm not quite sure if it's more revolutionary then for example a Voodoo, Riva TNT, Geforce256, or later the Geforce 8 / Radeon 2000. Especially the latter were a big revolution, with the introduction of true parallelisation with unified shaders and such.
Bonus points for Pipe Dream intro