Another Big THANK YOU to our channel artist for some retro Radeon Action: kzfaq.info-I6hTZM1MMM

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.

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.

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.

gotta love when your watching a old budget builds video and see a notification for a new one

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.

I remember that Warning regarding the power plug, good times...

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.

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.

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 KZfaq or 480p if I downloaded the youtube video and watched it with VLC player. Thanks for bringing back those memories. Good video.

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!

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

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.

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.

Budget builds, you have been a huge inspiration to me and I have started my own tech Chanel. Love your work mate

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.

welcome back. good to see regular uploads again

one of the main people who got me into pc building and messing around with parts, glad to see you back man

Love the videos , just finished watchin the whole backlog. glad to see your back with frequent uploads. love the new 3d retro graphics !

A lot of new videos lately, not complaining at all, always a great watch!

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.

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!

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

That windows install issue is SO WEIRD! Never in my life heard of a GPU or any other component wiping an OS

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.

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.

love the uploading schedule recently

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.

I had the 9500, did the mod to enable the remaining 4 cores and OCit, what a beast for half the cost

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!

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.

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.

This was super cool to see! I couldn't afford something this powerful back then, but I had a 9600 All-In-Wonder (with a TV tuner!), I think it might have been the 9600 Pro as it didn't have the weird port seen on the other versions in TPU's GPU database, and I loved that gpu. Unlocked to I think a 9700 with Omega drivers, and man, I didn't know anything about how PCs performed back then, but it did everything I wanted it to. Really wish I hadn't gotten rid of it!

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.

I remember the first computer I ever built with an AMD Athlon 2800+, 1.5GB of RAM, and a 9700 Pro. Good times.

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.

In my first own PC i had the Asus Radeon 9800 XT and man was I proud of that pretty designed AGP beast. And just 6 months after its release the new X Generation came out complete with the new PCI-E standard and it was basically obsolete over night. No times for the faint hearted.

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!

when the 9700 Pro hit, the magazines and early internet went nuts. It was THE card to have. I read about it all the time but I could never afford it. When the 9800 Pro came out I couldn't afford that either but I could afford it's little brother the 9600. That card served me well for years. Fond memories. But nothing brings me back like hearing someone mention the 9700 Pro, it was almost iconic.

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.

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 :)

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...

I had a barton core compaq computer when I was a kid. Brings back some great memories. I couldn't afford a 9700 though. Slide show graphics are still graphics.

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.

I still remember that speed bump when I went from GF4 Ti 4200 to a R9700 Pro. Like a day and night difference.

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 you go back to your regular videos :) keep up and stay doing some new gpus and more more tests :)

I still have that Compaq Presario case, I love how simple it is and the piano black look is sleek.

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.

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!

Extra thumb up for discovered installing from virtual drive trick.

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!

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!

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.

I am absolutely loving the PS1 Tomb Raider Menu type 3D model in the specs rundown - looks awesome!

This card brings back memories. Most of which I forgot but oh well.. Had a 9700 AIW and it was a great card. Could actually do a lot with it aside from games but I'm lazy and pretty much used it mainly on games. It was a fun time for computers way back then. A lot of great games came from that time in history.

That fan falling off 😂 top comedy!

I had one of these...and of course did the 9500Pro to 9700Pro upgrade to many friends.

The wobble when you're showing the card reminds me of the ps1 graphics

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.

KZfaq suggested your video from 2019-2020 and I watched all videos :)

I still have a fully functional Radeon 9800 Pro and I think this card is still amazing, it was an impressive improvement over other cards of its time.

Spent part of my student loan on one of these. Brilliant card...I still remember that demo with the balls flying around off the drums etc, I think it was called Pipe Dream? Good times.

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 still remember when I bought the Hercules Prophet 9700 PRO... It was the best card in the market back in 2003

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.

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 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.

I loved my... 9800 PRO!! :D Bit surprised you didn't go for the 9800 Pro instead, since that was the TRUE CHAMP.

Omg at 5:48, I thought the card was falling for a second LOL

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.

I remember buying this after a hard summers work. To connect it and start Armed and dangerous 2 with 3d hardware acceleration.. ❤❤❤ in that time it was like a day/night comparison when u bought a new gpu.. not only a couple of fps more .... Those days 😢😢

I bought my 9700 Pro in the summer of 2004, literally a couple of weeks before Doom 3 launched. It performed remarkably well in Doom 3 after the drivers fixed a shadow projection performance issue, and when I got Half-Life 2 later that year it looked and ran beautifully!

9700Pro was an amazing card! , still have mine packed away, was still working last time I checked.

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

Really digging the new visuals

I used to have one of those cards! I was so happy the day I installed it.

Radeon 9200 SE 64mb was my card as a kid. Loved that card even though it was limited.

I had one of these back in the day, truly a special piece of hardware.

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 the "all-in-wonder" version of this card. I used it for many years before finally upgrading.

ATI used to be well ahead of NVIDIA. In the 90's the FireGL1000 changed the way we used 3d software. It made software like Softimage able to run on a home PC and made 3d animation accessible to individuals or small studios.

I had a FX5200 in my first desktop. I swapped it out for a XFX 7300GT. Those were the days.

The proper solution to get GOG games installed without delays is to deactivate your Defender or other ancient security software that you're using. GOG packs most content into huge executables which old security software scanned in full which takes ages due to the outdated scanning tech they use. Add to that the outdated CPU in conjunction with a slow hard drive and you can wait for ages until the scan is done and access to the executable is passed back to the process. Why do ISOs not have the issue? Because the security software is aparantly detecting that the exe is running off of a read-only optical media and thus seemingly skips security checks, because quarantining or deleting malware wouldn't work. Packing all installers into an iso is a workaround, but a clunky one. I'd rather deactivate Defender. Btw, cool video. Really enjoy the detailed benchmarks and a really cool card.

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!

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.

I remember getting the first GeForce card. Still have it, in box. Because it was such a disappointment it ended back up in the box and shelved the week after I bought it. I went with a beast of a ATI card instead with dual gpu chips on it. :)

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.

Yessss new upload! Youre spoiling us with so much content, please keep it coming!

I had the Powercolor 9700Pro AIW, it died the day after Doom 3 released lol - I was devastated!!!

I had a 9500PRO and went to a 9800PRO, the difference was quite a bit, and using an Athlon XP 3200 Barton core with 1 gig of DDR400 and a Soltek Golden Flame main board it was a hell of a machine in it's day. The two 36 gig WD Raptors in RAID0 made it all load lightning fast, and until my friend got his 9800XT nothing else touched me 😅

I was just getting into the PC gaming scene when the 9700 Pro came out. I think it was the Maximum PC Dream Machine 2002 that featured a pre release (?) version of this card. I had to settle for a 9500 Pro, which I flogged the crap out of. Good times.

I don't understand why so many people hate Vista. I had it for years and I loved it. Never had any major problem with it and I quite liked the visuals of this O/S. Took me some time to switch to 7 because I really liked what I did evryday with Vista (I had Vista 64 Ultimate SP2 btw).

Got a Sapphire 9800SE still running in my old AthlonXP system. Those high 9000 series cards were tanks like the 5xxX series cards

I had a Sapphire 9600 XT OC and it was an absolute CnC Zero Hour beast!

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).

I remember drooling over this in PC gamer when I was a kid. I could never buy it, but I wanted it so bad

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.

Can you add the year the game released to the benchmarks so we get an idea of how a card held up over time?

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.