Sazar
Rest In Peace
- Joined
- 12 Apr 2002
- Messages
- 14,905
Originally posted by Heath3n
Well my opinion would be that they needed some lower end cards to provide affordable competition against the geoforce 3s & 4s. So they just used the same board and closed off some pipelines. I believe the 9500s and 9700 did not come out until after the 9700 pro. I have nothing to back up what I just said...but that's what I thinked happened.
thats only partially true...
far as I know only the sapphire gfx company is using the 9700 pcb's for their 9500 boards...
basically in order for them to sell the card as a 9500 they are making changes to close off 4 pipelines...
however not ALL the pcbs are 9700 ones... therefore if you say just buy a 9500 and make hardware/software changes to make it into a 9700... it will not work... only certain boards can be modded... and not the ati boards...
also if sapphire is doing this I don;t think they will be doing it much longer once ati gets a whiff of this...
all in all the 9500 (non-pro) is designed to compete NOT with the 4200 but its gf4 mx brethren which it does quite well...
the 9500pro competes with the 4200 market...
the 9700 (non-pro) competes with the 4400/4600 and the 4800/4800 se market...
the 9700pro currently does not have a competitor...