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Gigabyte's
MAYA II R9700 Pro
- Setting The Standard
|
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Author
: Martyn Date : 16th
Nov 2002
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3DVelocity wish to thank Gigabyte
UK and especially Hiten for providing this card
for our review.
| ...Product |
Gigabyte's
MAYA II R9700 Pro |
| ...Manufacturer |
Gigabyte |
| ...Supplier |
Gigabyte |
| ...Price |
£320
Approx. |
Part Five: The Test Setup
The card in question: Gigabyte's
Maya II Radeon 9700 Pro [ATi
Cat v.61.78]
Abit's
Geforce 4 Ti 4600 [Det 40.72]
Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz
Kingston 512MB Rambus @ 1066
Abit's
TH7II [i850]
Maxtor 20GB ATA 133.
Windows
XP Service Pack One
(Notes On Testing)
Firstly, both cards are set to use best
performance when benchmarking and this is a potential
contention. The nV settings for best performance look
absolutely terrible when compared to ATi's. It can therefore
be viewed that due to the blurred textures, the nV card
has a slight advantage.
Do also note that SP1 was used for Windows which may affect
scores slightly. All programs used have been updated to
their latest versions, if a patch was available then we
used it.
(Initial Problems)
Despite the excellent presentation of the package,
Gigabyte's main driver CD was woefully inept! The inclusion
of very old drivers didn't help installing the card
at all. In fact the shipped drivers refused to work
under any Intel based setup I cared to try. Upon booting
to Windows the machine would instantly restart every
single time resulting in an unusable card and a very
frustrated reviewer. The problems were fixed with some
updated drivers from ATi's support site but I always
feel that the card should work correctly out of the
box, this is a very, very expensive product after all!
During testing the Radeon 9700 was unshakable, no minor
driver bugs were experienced and it was a true pleasure
to test the card in all the usual benchmarks.
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