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| Sapphire 9500 |
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About Sapphire Sapphire's Standards, in their
own words: • 64MB or 128MB DDR
memory accelerates the latest 3D games
I know there are many
newer and faster cards available today but I didn't have the $$$ required
to get a Radeon 9800 or Nvidia FX 5900. I purchased the OEM version
of the Sapphire Radeon 9500 from one of our local wholesaler outlets
and as it turns out this little gem performs on par with many of the
9700 Pro's. I didn't get the fancy retail box and free games but I did
get all of the vital components that would have been included in the
retail box all for $204 Canadian or roughly $149.53 USD plus the applicable
taxes of course. If I had to get a Nvidia card in the same price range
off Newegg
lets say, the closest card I could find in price was the Gainward
GeForce4 Ti4200 PowerPack! Ultra/650-8X XP Golden Sample
As an after
thought I guess I should mention that only certain 9500 Non Pro cards
will reach these speeds without any artifacts OK so why did I go for
the 9500 Non Pro you ask.... Well it was by accident, I had owned the
9500 Pro but during an episode of "Stupid Human Tricks", I
damaged the core while tugging on the shim from hell. My card had been
overheating even without being OC'd so after doing a quick search on
Google I figured out what was causing my 9500 Pro to overheat. The thickness
of the shim prevented the heatsink from making good contact with the
GPU. The beauty of it was that when I went to buy a new card they only
had the 9500 or I would have probably bought another 9500 Pro. I thought
I should also point out the
nice article written by Wyrethewolf that walks you through the steps
required to soft mod the Sapphire Radeon 9500. Test System Since I am a big fan of Omega's
Drivers and I always tend to use his latest release, which in this
case are currently based on ATI's Catalyst 3.7. The next two images
are the results of 3DMark01 SE at default clock speed. The performance
levels @ Default in the Direct 3D portion of the control panel in the
first one and set to full performance on the second one. With all the
hype and fighting over the graphics card crown, I also want to remind
people that they dont have to spend several hundred dollars to get a
kickin' video card. 3dmark2001se
As you can see there is points to be gained just by adjusting the performance setting in the Direct 3D Control Panel tab of the Catalyst display settings. Next I am gonna crank things up almost to the max I know the card can survive with RadClocker and see if I can hit 15K.
Well as you can see above
I did manage to hit the 15K mark in 3DMark 2001. Not too shabby for
a $200 dollar card I'd say !! Staying with the Futuremark products I
am gonna fire up 3DMark 2003 and see how this baby performs. Under normal
conditions I run the card with the core and memory in sync at 300/300
DDR or 600/600 MHz without a hitch. 3dmark2003 BUILD 330
Ok so we start out with
stock clock speeds of 276/270, then move up to 300/300 and finally 382/303,
all with stock cooling. I want to mention that if you are going to overclock
any components make sure that you have good airflow in your case if
you want to obtain decent results. Our first results are 4365/4367,
which I consider to be great results with little to no difference between
the default settings and the performance settings. In the ATI
Benchmarking thread I dug out this bit of info supplied by Catalyst
Maker in regards to expected 3DMark03 results. System: P4 - 3.06 GHz i850e Defaults 3DMark settings, CATALYST control panel on performance setting Radeon 9700 Pro: 4772
As you can see with our
speeds @ 300/300 our results are right in line with the expected scores
produced by the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. I must say that I was surprised
to see this card produce these scores at these clock speeds since a
9700 Pro is clocked at 324/310 out of the box as far as I know.
After running through
all the 3DMark tests I could handle I figured I might as well throw
AquaMark 3 into the picture
since it's supposed to represent real time gameplay, in a benchmarking
environment. You can find compare URLs to my AquaMark results in this
thread. 3dmark2003 BUILD 330
Well there you have it, a $200 video card that keeps up with the big boys on the block. I would like to thank Sapphire for making such a sweet card @ a fantastic price and ATI for sticking to their guns and releasing new Catalyst Drivers for us all on a regular basis. And with the mention of the next Catalyst 3.8 release being a bigtime change for the better, I can only sit back and wait impatiently for them to appear..... Chaos is a gold member on Driverheaven.net and can frequently be seen helping members ....
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