For a long time, ATI used to work as a
standalone OEM; they designed their own chips and were they
only ones to sell retail products based on them. That
business model worked really well for them in the early 90’s
and even managed to dominate the PC graphics market for a
long period along with other players such as S3 and Matrox.
But then it came 3dfx days, NVIDIA followed, and things
started to work differently, at least if you wanted to keep
your business alive in the consumer market.
Following NVIDIA’s
route, nowadays, ATI works closely with a number of selected
card manufacturers that distribute and market ATI powered
boards around the globe; while ATI keeps producing chips in
quantity, they have now limited their own branded board
distribution to North America.
First International Computer (or FIC, as most of us like to
call them) is one of such partners that offer Radeon based
videocards, today we will be taking a close look to the
A97P, Radeon 9700 Pro board. Without doubt, a product that
doesn’t need much of an introduction, ATI has been all over
the headlines ever since they released the first line of
9x00 boards last year, ranging from budget to mid-priced and
high-end boards like the 9700 Pro.
Seven months later,
NVIDIA has given up momentarily and ATI still hasn’t found a
worthy competitor for the fastest Radeons however
they recently announced they would revamp the 9x00 line in order to cut
production costs and at the same
time improve performance slightly by improving
manufacturing processes.
By the time we are posting this, newer Radeon 9800 Pro
boards will become available in a matter of
days/weeks but actually that’s what make things more
interesting… prices of 9700 Pro boards have been lowered
considerably ($310
by the time of posting) making them a great buy, not to
mention changes between 9700 & 9800 boards could be
considered minimal both feature and performance wise, so
keep on reading as you may find this is the card you were
looking for.
The FIC A97P like any
other Radeon 9700 Pro board supports some rather interesting
features that are worth spending some time detailing, these
same features are shared among 9x00 series products: Hyper Z
III, SmartShader 2.0, Truform 2.0, SmoothVision 2.0,
VideoShader & AGP 8X.
The card
The A97P featured 3
outputs on the backplate - a standard VGA port, S-Video port
& a DVI port. Conveniently enough the packaging included the
relevant adapters & cables for those as well, i.e. S-Video
-> Composite converter, Composite cable, S-Video cable & a
DVI -> VGA adapter. Clearly you should have no problem
connecting a display device to this product.
Looking at the card
itself, it didn’t seem to differ much from ATI’s reference
board; FIC has also kept the red PCB but has equipped the
card with a fancier copper cooler that should do more than a
decent job for the Radeon 9700 Pro which doesn’t require
anything <cough> too special for running at normal
temperatures.
Installation of the
board went along relatively easily. Ironically a power
connector needs to be connected to the card (Just like the
Voodoo 5 5500, something which many found rather humorous at
the time), which should minimize any AGP slot power
incompatibilities/inadequacies – clearly 3dfx wasn’t too far
off the mark.
Upon booting into Windows XP the Radeon was detected as
expected & I installed the latest available
Catalyst Drivers/Control Panel from ATI – that being
version 3.1 at the time of installation & 3.2 by the time of
writing this review and benchmarking. Overall we have found
ATI’s drivers support to be excellent, especially
considering their dark background from just a couple of
years ago.
In addition to the
Drivers FIC also bundles WinDVD, InterVideo’s excellent
software DVD decoder. Last but not least, something of a
chance from the norm, FIC actually went and included a
printed users’ manual with the Graphics card, which gives
details on configuring the board (also available online as
well in PDF format).
