The CARD that CRUSHED Nvidia - ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro
Ғылым және технология
Hello everyone and welcome back to another Budget Builds Episode where today we're taking a look at the card that crushed Nvidia. Very literally offering twice the performance at the same price it's about time we took a look at a card that has achieved a legendary status and find out...Just how good is it really, and mostly marvel at ATI offering a card with no compromise.
Intro - 0:00
Why the Radeon 9700 - 0:15
Does it Power On - 0:45
The History Part 1: Radeon 8500 and Geforce 4Ti - 2:20
The History Part 2: The Launch of the Radeon 9700 - 3:22
The History Part 3: The Nvidia FX Flop etc... - 4:13
Our Card is Crumbling Apart - 5:08
The Specs - 5:40
The Condition - 6:47
Windows XP Woes - 7:40
Windows Vista Victories - 9:06
What Drivers to use - 9:48
Getting Games on the PC - 10:30
The System - 12:03
The Benchmarks - 12:38
Finally getting some other OS's on there - 20:50
Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7 Comparison - 21:39
Conclusion - 23:24
Patreon: / budgetbuilds
Twitter: / budget_builds_
Specs:
GPU: Radeon 9700Pro
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+
RAM: 1GB DDR400 Mhz RAM
OS: Windows XP SP1, Windows 2000, Windows Vista SP2, Windows 7
Пікірлер: 391
Another Big THANK YOU to our channel artist for some retro Radeon Action: kzread.info-I6hTZM1MMM
@jskyg68
Күн бұрын
Hopefully you'll run across the very last ATI agp card, the x1950 pro agp, I bought one new it was a beast.
@jensv874
Күн бұрын
Yea the coolers on that card are bad. Mine just disconected and the fan was on the bottem of the case. Got an afermarket zalman cooler for it with ram cooling. OC t f out of that card. Good times.
gotta love when your watching a old budget builds video and see a notification for a new one
@bezceljudzelzceljsh5799
2 күн бұрын
I miss the bargain bin series, but nostalgia cards are fine too. I think the format is largely what reeled me in.
@BudgetBuildsOfficial
2 күн бұрын
Got some bargains coming up in the next few weeks
@xbrun3356
2 күн бұрын
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial yay
If the bottom of your heatsink is flat, and you don't do either a shim mod, a cooler swap, or remove the metal bracket from around the GPU, your card will die over time if you replaced the factory thermal material with normal modern paste. ATI used a semi-rigid yellow material halfway between paste and pad to make a mechanical connection between the cooler and GPU die, replacing this with liquid paste will cause the heatsink to put pressure on the frame surrounding the GPU, and not the die itself. This was fixed on the 9800 with a raised contact area on the heatsink, but stock 9700's and 9500's need to be modded to make a good connection with modern pastes.
@wowitsshit9734
2 күн бұрын
Best put the zalman after market
@ignotumperignotius630
Күн бұрын
interesting
@Stermy57HW
6 сағат бұрын
I was about to write the same. You came first
I remember that Warning regarding the power plug, good times...
@Nas_Allie
2 күн бұрын
Now you just get a black screen 🥲
At last, the 9700Pro. "Everyone" goes on about 9800, but this was OG. Sadly I could only ever afford a 9600Pro, which I stuck a massive Zalman passive heatsink on! Fun times.
@thegeforce6625
2 күн бұрын
The Radeon 9600 Pro and XT are surprisingly good for their price and power consumption.
@ShumanGore
2 күн бұрын
@@thegeforce6625 9600 pro gang here!! I have it on a NF7-M and a t-bred Athlon
@TheVanillatech
2 күн бұрын
@@thegeforce6625 Yeah the 9600 Pro was better overall than the FX5600 Ultra. Particularly cos of better DX9 performance. I think the FX had the lead in OpenGL titles though, like Return To Castle Wolfenstein and Quake III.
@galmud1508
2 күн бұрын
Same. Could only afford a 9600 xt but it performed great paired with a socket 754 Athlon 64 3000+. And it could actually run Morrowind with tessellation (aka Truform) which was pretty wild back in 2003. Good times.
@TheVanillatech
2 күн бұрын
@@galmud1508 Morrowind was the biggest memory leak ever coded.
I bought a crucial Radeon 9700 many years ago. One day I was playing Doom III and noticed white snow like pixels dancing all over the screen. Turned out my card had a problem. I called Crucial and they told me to box it up and return it, which I did. Two weeks later, I got a package. They'd sent me a brand new Radeon 9800 Pro as a replacement! What a company. Bought nothing but Crucial RAM ever since.
@MJ-uk6lu
2 күн бұрын
I had similar story with Corsair USB stick. I had 8GB Voyager GT USB 2.0 and it died one day. Brought it to RMA and got Voyager GT USB 3.0 16GB as replacement. Double capacity and faster.
@TheVanillatech
Күн бұрын
@@MJ-uk6lu Yeah very good company, and a very good (and well deserved) reputation.
@MJ-uk6lu
Күн бұрын
@@TheVanillatech Well, not really. All their stuff is badly overpriced, so at least there's some saving grace. Weird thing is that Corsair as a whole is barely profitable.
@TheVanillatech
Күн бұрын
@@MJ-uk6lu Over the decades I've always thought their RAM prices were pretty much in line with Kingston etc. At least here in the UK. Maybe 4-5% premium paid for Crucial, but with the LIFETIME warranty ... it's hardly over priced! That 9700 was exactly the same price as every other 9700 too. I only bought it because I wasn't aware back then that Crucial even made video cards. So it was a novelty for me. One that paid off!
Ahh, that card brings back memories, was part of the verification team for that ASIC, lots of stories to tell including a bug that actually made it to silicon but was software worked around. It was a beast! Stretched our capabilities to the max.
@drewnewby
2 күн бұрын
@repatch43 Just curious as to why you refer to it as an ASIC, since GPU was the terminology then. I considered them as more general purpose computing than ASIC, but compared to a CPU at the time, I guess I could see it either way.
@cal2127
2 күн бұрын
@@drewnewby they were asics back then, programmable shaders were pretty new back then.
@repatch43
2 күн бұрын
@@drewnewby Can only say that's what we referred to it as.
@drewnewby
2 күн бұрын
@repatch43 Thanks, I couldn't remember exactly when it shifted. @cal2127 True, very new then.
I only know about the 9800 Pro. It was a monster. Picked an OEM one up for £125 in early 2004. Four years of gaming bliss till I swapped it out for a 1950 Pro in 2008. ATI was the way to go back then.
@chrisvig123
2 күн бұрын
As I recall you could mod the bios and make it into a 9800XT
@wowitsshit9734
2 күн бұрын
@@chrisvig123 I wouldn't recommend, the ones that have heat diode can be upgraded, I did but my diode was busted, didn't run any faster than oc pro, I reflash back to pro
@MJ-uk6lu
2 күн бұрын
@@chrisvig123 With some luck yeah and if you pumped voltage you could overclock them somewhat as well. I remember some dud modding later X800 series card (some of which were just rebadged 9700/9800 series) with BIOS and then raising clocks by nearly 50% and all it needed was just DIY water cooling setup with copper block. That was crazy time for modders. After that time, newer cards needed more power and cooling and such results could only be achieved with LN2 and a bit later even LN2 wasn't enough to cope with heat density anymore.
@guywhoknows
2 күн бұрын
Did the same 1950 pro xt Vivo... Still works and in the original box ;) I used it for a while and upgraded to a Nvidia 8800gtx.
@wowitsshit9734
Күн бұрын
@@vespasian606 wtf my comments not get posted
AGP cards, oh boy. Don't miss them. Anyway, nice to see you back to uploading more commonly! Also noticed you updated your intro, been watching you for years haha
@SharpShoot3r_14
11 сағат бұрын
What's wrong with AGP cards?
The reason those cards are dying so much and are rare now is the metallic ring around the GPU. Originally intended to protect the DIE, the glue they used is flawed and over time it starts to expand, pushing the ring up, and with the old thermal paste that is now acting as a hard-glue on the GPU, it keeping pulling the GPU chip away from the PCB until the solder joints rip. This is a known issue of all original R300 cards, and if you have such a card and you do not want to lose it, it is A MUST to remove the cooler and remove the metallic ring, then re-attach the cooler with a new paste. Some of the later 9800 cards "solved" this by having metallic extension at the bottom of the cooler so it would not directly touch the ring, those are ok to keep around without any changes.
Budget builds, you have been a huge inspiration to me and I have started my own tech Chanel. Love your work mate
I had an ATI 9550 card on a socket 423 Pentium 1.7ghz pc at our vacation property for years! It could just barely play COD 4 single player, I'd play Half Life 2 and other games on rainy days. The dsl line maxed out at 4mb/s on perfect sunny weather days and would get slower when it rained or snowed. It was 240p KZread or 480p if I downloaded the youtube video and watched it with VLC player. Thanks for bringing back those memories. Good video.
@paulyadams
2 күн бұрын
I had an Athlon xp 2800+ and a 9550 that I reflashed with a 9600 pro bios and also overclocked it. I do miss those days of crazy overclocking.the 9550 was the first GPU I ever bought, and it was made by this unknown company (at the time) called Powercolor.
@DanielCardei
2 күн бұрын
For old games and building a retro machine with that card its very achievable. those ATI 9550 goes on eBay really cheap. hmmm 🤔
I remember this card very well, i always wanted one but never did. I actually waited and got the 9800 Pro which had upgraded VRAM with DDR2 rather than DDR on the 9700 Pro. I also overclocked the snot out of it. It died on me in 2005 I had pushed it too far, I then grabbed a X1900XTX and the difference was utterly insane. This card is was even faster than the Xbox 360 which was based on the X1800XTX but with cut down specs. Oblivion looked insane for the time, and the Nvidia 7900GTX still couldn't keep up with its old decrete pixel pipelines whereas the X1900XTX was the first unified shader architecture.
@TheDunbartxeen
2 күн бұрын
Actually, no. The first unifed shader architecture was the Xbox 360 GPU. On PC the ATI 2000 Series followed. 1000 Series was still with Pixel and Vertex Shaders
@Fezzy976
2 күн бұрын
The X1000 series did have semi-unified shaders the first of its kind. By merging geometry and pixel shaders into just pixel shaders. Yes the architecture still had descrete vertex shaders. 360 was based off the same architecture with the entire shader array being unified as it was taped out of a later design but ran at lower power draw, clocks and mem frequiences. Nvidia's 7000GTX series, which went head to head with the X1000 series, still used completely descrete pipelines for pixel, geometry, and vertex. X1000 series was the first to unify any of them.
it's cool how on the early-mid 2000s the technology was evolving so fast that a GPU would actually have a hard time running triple A games that came out 4-5 years after it, meanwhile nowadays, the 2015~2018 cards are not 100% obsolete yet and can still run some new AAA... Also idk why but older hardware have some sort of unique charm on the beauty department, idk
@Leeki85
20 сағат бұрын
You can run every new AAA game on GTX 970 (2014). Sometimes even getting 30+ FPS at 1080p medium settings. GTX 980 will work even better since it has full 4 GB of VRAM. Small amount of memory is the main problem with these GPUs, since they still have the performance. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is the only AAA game I wasn't able to get stable 30 FPS. It was 26-28 FPS on average. Though this game uses ray-tracing even on lowest settings, so 20+ FPS with RT on a GPU that was released few years before RTX become a thing is still impressive. However these old GPUs perform much better on modern hardware. I was testing my old GTX 970 on my new PC when I was waiting for RTX Super release. Most 970 and 980 cards will be paired with 4-core i5 or 4/8 i7. These CPUs will definitely reduce the performance in modern games.
welcome back. good to see regular uploads again
I must say - Making the folders of installers for GOG games turned in to ISO's and loaded as virtual disks to get Vista to run them is kinda a brilliant move and be better documented than it currently is.
Bought an ATI 9800 AIW near launch, I used an API wrapper to run NVIDIA's "fairy" demo, and it crushed their flagship FPS on the demo using a wrapper! Still have the card! I had also installed CoolerMaster's copper cooling kit which had heatsinks for ALL (front and back) VRAM chips (it didn't have any VRAM cooling stock), o\c'd as much as it would take. I should still have the screenshot of the fairy demo with fps, I did have to photoshop out the NVIDIA logo and replace it with the ATI one. Never found out who made that wrapper, but hats off!
A lot of new videos lately, not complaining at all, always a great watch!
Love the videos , just finished watchin the whole backlog. glad to see your back with frequent uploads. love the new 3d retro graphics !
love the uploading schedule recently
one of the main people who got me into pc building and messing around with parts, glad to see you back man
I don't know what timeline we are in where we are getting a flood of new budget builds videos, but I'm loving it!
finally you go back to your regular videos :) keep up and stay doing some new gpus and more more tests :)
You work really hard to make this many tests and in a very entertaining way. Love your channel congratulations on everything!! Keep it up!! From Portugal!
I remember the first computer I ever built with an AMD Athlon 2800+, 1.5GB of RAM, and a 9700 Pro. Good times.
Yessss new upload! Youre spoiling us with so much content, please keep it coming!
KZread suggested your video from 2019-2020 and I watched all videos :)
My first contact with such a card was an ATi All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro. Amazing card, didn't live very long after I got it unfortunately since I picked it up out of a garbage can.
Awesome to see another video
man clean the keyboard xD great video gotta love these agp cards
Amazing vid and super nostalgic! Love these cards! I was lucky enough to have an All in Wonder 9800 back in the day. I never watched tv on it really.. but I did have it output to a TV as a second monitor pretty regularly. I even VHS recorded some quake and such back in the day.. but sadly those VHS were lost to time... such sad!
Omg, I remember saving up to buy one of these when I was a kid. It was the top tier gaming card at the time. So many happy memories watching this!
I remember upgrading from my LeadTek WInfast Ti4600 to the 9700 Pro. Night and day difference. I ran the 9700 Pro for a couple years and it handled all the new game releases during that time with ease.
@fuzzymuppet1990
2 күн бұрын
There's a brand i haven't heard of in 20 years, hah! , I had a hercules nvidia gts card before i got my ati 9800. Mmm nostalgia berries
Really digging the new visuals
Got one with Zalman copper cooler and it was my first card I used over a year. Power was real and lasted for a long time. Great content again! Thank You! Feels like it's time to dust some old stuff, Athlon XP - Phenom II X6, HD 1950 XTX and GF 8800 GTS 640Mb etc. If I can find Win CD's that still work. SCSI Raptors shaking already :)
I have a 9500 in a XP Dell machine that I did the driver update to the 9700 pro and the card still manages to surprise me with some of the things I throw at it! I had to replace the fan because it was frozen so I Frankensteined a heatsink and fan onto it and its run great ever since! I never thought of putting it in a Vista machine and I have a couple of those same computers! Thank you for another excellent video!
I saw for first time Doom 3 running on 9700 pro back in 04-05, stunned i was stunned, similar experience when i saw Uneal fly by castle on TnT2 for the first time.
@volvo09
2 күн бұрын
The castle intro for the original unreal was so cool back in the day.
@RaPtOr9600
2 күн бұрын
@@volvo09 For me still it is especially on god CRT. And retro hardware. Don't know nostalgia kicks in hard, simpler times
@spikester
11 сағат бұрын
@@RaPtOr9600 The musical mod soundtrack of Unreal was absolutely the best of its time, can't forget some of those moments in the game.
@RaPtOr9600
11 сағат бұрын
@@spikester Same here, sometimes i listen to soundtracks from Unreal 1 And UT99 in gym
I loved that time of PC hardware. Back in the days, i was so jealous of my friend running Morrowind with a 9800 pro. Great video!
Your channel is always so relaxing and informative. #HowItsMadeVibes had this exact same computer at one point. Hitting the nostalgia
Extra thumb up for discovered installing from virtual drive trick.
Man waht a time for a budget gamer. You had the Athlon 2500 "barton" with its awesome overclocking and then a redeon 9500 you could flash into a full 9700. It was like magic playing Halo and Half Life.
Oddly, in the multiple decades I've built and bought my computers, I've only had one video card fail. It was a PCIe Radeon HD5770. Never had a single issue with AGP on either Socket 7 or Socket A.
@gorjy9610
2 күн бұрын
Heat is main reason for cards to fail. People ignore bad fans (or just too much dust) for too long and they all die in the end, especially these old cards which didn't throttle under high temperatures.
@Jerkwad152
2 күн бұрын
@@gorjy9610 Very true.
@Alpine_flo92002
2 күн бұрын
@@gorjy9610 Modern cards heat rarely matters (atleast below 90c) as most modern issues are factory issues or just straight up die cracks
I had the 9500, did the mod to enable the remaining 4 cores and OCit, what a beast for half the cost
im so happy to see a video out only 3 hours after its come out
Very nice video.
Thanks, nice vid, nostalgia
The wobble when you're showing the card reminds me of the ps1 graphics
I still have that Compaq Presario case, I love how simple it is and the piano black look is sleek.
I love your videos man
I remember saving for one of these as a student; they were amazing cards. I have a few in my collection which I have replaced the cooler on with a third party cooler.
I am fortunate to own two "little brothers" of the Radeon 9700. Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT with 256 MB VRAM & Asus Radeon 9600 SE with 128 or 64 MB VRAM Both in working condition.
I remember these cards running so hot, and driver being so buggy, it was the PC-building equivalent of selling your soul to the devil.
Very nice Video Loved it. You Bring such random content in a positive way i Just can't Stop watching. I know it's all about tech but I have to give compliment for them not to be the only handsome Thing. You Look so cool at 21:40
@BudgetBuildsOfficial
Күн бұрын
Thank you for that 👍
So Great!!
Those were great times. At that time I had a 9600 SE in my dorm room PC. The card only had a small passive cooling block, no fan. When I moved back home, I realised that the cooling block had fallen off and the thermal paste had dried out. However, this did not affect the performance and stability.
One thing I recently wondered about, and this goes for newer unsupported AMD cards as well, how much of an improvement, if any, do the newer open source Linux drivers actually give you? And holy shit, that monitot is beyond cursed...
It's nice he started uploading more and more interesting content
Man thanks to your videos I'm seriously considering building a baller Win XP Pc just for retro games. Great video as always, much appreciated.
@jonchapman6821
Күн бұрын
Do it! It’s worth every moment of your time and every cent of your money. I use a 750ti in mine, I used to run it on a 4th gen core system with a Pentium G3258 (anniversary edition) but I’ve recently changed to a 1st gen (1366) system for my overkill XP rig and it’s just so good with an early i7 or Xeon👌🏻
@ahmetkemalkeskin5445
Күн бұрын
@@jonchapman6821 Oh that sounds sweet. When I have the space, I will definitely do a similar build man. Thanks for the info.
I am absolutely loving the PS1 Tomb Raider Menu type 3D model in the specs rundown - looks awesome!
We used these cards in industrial PC chassis' as Image Generators providing the out-the-window view for professional flight-crew training simulators back in the day. Quite nostalgic seeing that red PCB again. 🙂
Finally got thing to watch while eating
My 2nd PC from 2007 (we were poor) had an Athlon 64 3500+ (Venice core) and a 256MB Sapphire 9600XT. Basically a 9700 Pro cut in half but with a much faster core clock. I was too young to know how obsolete those parts were in 2007 but I had a lot of fun with them. I still have both of them in a box and might rebuild that PC if I get hold of a socket 939 board. I only ever had ATI/AMD cards and CPUs in my desktops. Currently on a 5700x and RX 570 8GB, both overclocked. Sometimes I think of upgrading the 570 but I have no reason to, as it still plays everything I want nearly maxed out.
Nice video. The 9000 series were awesome, I got a 9800se from my friend recently and it performs great. Don't worry, one day the prices will have to go down, because sellers can't keep the prices high forever, since nobody would buy overpriced goods.
I had one of these back in the day, truly a special piece of hardware.
I went from this card to the ATI A.I.W. 9800 Pro back in the day, mainly for the remote t.v. functionality with seemingly little difference in overall performance....both are legends.
It's really impressive you were able to test on 4 different operating systems with this card. It must have taken days to get it to work properly.
I had several 9700, and 9800se units, these were the GPUs that had the TV part as well. For a long long time my goto kit. Good times.
Omg at 5:48, I thought the card was falling for a second LOL
@Avethis
Күн бұрын
also lol at the very last clip with the fan falling out. "well that's gone... wrong."
I had one of these cards back in the day. It was a bloody beast. Ran Doom 3 quite decently well, which is something few cards could do at the time, and it was a card that came out 2 years prior.
I was 17 when I upgraded from a GeForce 4 ti 4200 to the 9700 (non pro). It was a magical time. Battlefield 1942 with 4xAA, 8xAF. Doom 3 playable. Literally game changing technology.
9700Pro was an amazing card! , still have mine packed away, was still working last time I checked.
Another video ? Damn ‼️
I still have my 9800 pro in a box somewhere, as well has a 6600gt and 7900 gtx. I work at a college and something that is quite sad is there are dozens of 9800 pros in a drawer that have been taken apart for students to learn surface mount soldering
I honestly can't imagine benchmarking old AGP cards going well. I have a couple lying around for troubleshooting purposes, but that's about it.
I remembered getting ATI cards when they first started. I believe I paid over $200 for their 4MB All in Wonder card and it played Need for Speed on the PC nicely. I did have the same ATI 9700 Pro card in the late 90s and still have that one and a few extra ones. Those are great video cards. ATI was the king during the 90s. You see them everywhere and even on the Nintendo Gamecube. Changed after they got brought off by AMD.
huh, Ive always been using isos and wondered why people have so much issues with their install, your discovery would explain so much lol
I had a 9500 I modded into a 9700 and built a new heatsink for it out of an Intel low profile copper CPU cooler. One of the greatest values I've ever got in pc parts next to my AMD Barton which a got nearly a ghz overvlock with stock voltage and air cooling. THOSE were the days for enthusiasts.
gosh i miss those green easy release tabs on those older cases lol
I upgraded to a FIC 9500 Pro when they came out. Today, I only have a couple AGP cards, a 9200 SE, and a 9600 XT. They're more reliable than the older 9500 / 9700 Pro cards. So many of those have failed due to the original heatsink design.
To add to the iso thing. This is a vista specific issue and there is a version of power iso that will let you mount any file as an iso and vista loves it. This works for fixing games that don’t want to launch from their exe but for some reason will launch if it thinks it’s on a disc. Vista things 😂
Ooo I had a 9800 pro aiw when I built my first PC out of high school lol
That fan falling off 😂 top comedy!
I remember when I upgraded to Athlon 1700+ and 9700 Pro from a PIII + GeForce 2MX, it felt like a bigger jump than from my Voodoo 2 to the GeForce..
I had the Powercolor 9700Pro AIW, it died the day after Doom 3 released lol - I was devastated!!!
The great grandfather of the of the 9700 Pro is actually the Nintendo 64. ArtX that made the GPU for the Nintendo GameCube was founded by the same people at Silicon Graphics that worked on the N64. When ATi gobbled up ArtX in 2000 they did it specifically to get the Z-buffer, ROP technology, and TEV units (like a primitive form of pixel shaders) that made the GameCube a graphics powerhouse and allowed for the great leap ahead of Nvidia with the 9700 Pro in 2002, this kind of semi programable primitive shader like features is something Silicon Graphics pioneer in the Nintendo 64 as a way to keep the die size small but still get a lot of use out of it. p.s. Halo 2 can be coaxed into running on XP. Its actually a DirectX9 game.
based on the error, mount & blade didn't run because either the audio drivers weren't installed, or nothing was plugged into the audio output and it freaked out iirc error code 0 means it was a handled exception, meaning its designed to shut the game down if no audio drivers/output are available
Man that monk in Oblivion must have done a lot of cocaine. I am surprised with the performance on Crysis. Bravo! Regarding Vista, I got it when it was new, it was my OS after XP. Vista 64 never caused me any issues at all. I ended up using it, bypassing Windows 7, till Windows 8.1 I was fine with it. No problems and even ran some older games better than XP did. To this day I say Vista 64 was good. Regarding the GOG fix. I am pretty sure I heard this tip before and for some reason I think I heard it from you. Not recently too. Thanks for the fun video! PS. I don't know how you did it, but I love the CGI with the card (and the PC before).
Mine went through literal hell. It started life with my my p4 Prescott and retired many years later when I used it in a Mac g4 MDD I maxed out for fun.
Noticed at 9:44 you had the Enemy and Fear books under the desk. I didnt know you were a Charlie Higson fan!
@BudgetBuildsOfficial
Күн бұрын
Not my desk unfortunately.
this was my 2nd gaming gpu, upgraded from the gforce 2 mx400. great times in gaming
I remember being a kid and seeing this card in every build. My first graphics card was a Chinese version of this card I think I paid 30 bucks for it and paired with a AMD Athlon 1700+ machine I pulled out of a dumpster behind a gym. Those were the days!
That windows install issue is SO WEIRD! Never in my life heard of a GPU or any other component wiping an OS
on some of these, you could buy a 9500 pro and flash it to a 9700 pro - and in my case, I was one of the first people to flash my 9800 Pro 256MB to a 9800 XT. This was such a great era in gaming as this was when Half Life 2 was released.
Still have mine, its in beautiful condition and if i had an old machine would work.
I had this card good card i have the TV tuner version of it the LP I still have it too cables too years later I loved this card
So glad I was too young/clueless when AGP cards where the norm, my first real desktop that I spent a decent of time playing on was some Sony Vaio my dad handed down to me, that thing almost definitely had an ATI AGP card in it due to it's age but I only needed it for WoW so it did a good job! I kind of regret it getting thrown out as it would have been a great PC to hold onto for Windows XP/Vista gaming on actual hardware.
My first ATI card was an AX800Pro. Still have it sitting in a case, haven’t turned it on in ages. I should probably pull it and make it a shelf queen.
A general fix for things opengl/dx related when it comes to compatibility is to use both wined9d for windows and mesa LLVMpipe for windows; they are both drag and drop dll's you paste into a games binary folder (the folder with the exe) and it will get it run regardless of what the driver says. It works with some added overhead on the performance. Its a trick I used to use during college to run cad programs when inside a vm when i still had a passion for computers.
The 9700 Pro was the last ATI card I had, it ran what was my most played game at the time (Battlefield Vietnam) flawlessly. Fond memories, I moved to Nvidia because the drivers were better for some of the older pre 2000 titles I was in to like Dungeon Keeper 2.
Ive a few of these, the fan were not as bad as gainward cards that melted, but hot box really did kill the fans on these. Ive a new ati artic cooler pro 2 on mine. Yes new, some of us new old stock fro. Back in the day when i built the best systems Perhaps youd come play at my house, youd never leave lol.. Mind you would probably finish some of my builds, the top kit from way back!!