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.
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.
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.
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 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.
@@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!
Never knew that Crucial made GPUs that's interesting. Reminds me something that BFG Tech would have done because of the lifetime warranty that they offered.
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 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.
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.
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 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
@@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.
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.
@@armorgeddon No, That is completely different chip and this does not happen there. Most of the 9600 series cards are still running fine, except the fan off course.
This is interesting to know, thank you. I still have my original 9700 Pro in my shed somewhere, when I eventually get it out again some day I'll do this. What is the technique for removal of the metal ring, is it just pried off, or pried with heat? I imagine there are videos on the mod, but I like to ask anyway! :)
@@Sobbsy Well since this is "go bad with time" waiting is not recommended it may be dead already. First I would test it to see its still fine so that you are not wasting your time, then I would heavily load it so the thermal paste on the GPU hopefully softens up a bit, and then remove the cooler by twisting it sideways, do not pry it up, that could rip the core, twist it sideways until it lets go. As it comes to removing the ring, use a lot of solvent and razor blade to carefully cut it off without damaging the PCB under it.
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.
@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.
@@drewnewby DX 8 and GeForce 3 was when the first programmable units were introduced. If that's what you're asking. I can't remember asic being used to describe them. But if the shoe fits I guess.
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 CZcams or 480p if I downloaded the youtube video and watched it with VLC player. Thanks for bringing back those memories. Good video.
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.
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 Nothing. I never had a problem with any AGP card. The worst thing was early VIA chipsets with suggestions to run them at a lower AGP speed for stability, but I never did and never had a problem. I think drivers helped those that did have problems. Of course there were motherboard manufacturers that didn't use ta he correct keyed slots, so some 5V boards would accept a 3.3V card, while not having a universal slot, and kill the card. That's still not an AGP problem. Many other interfaces go through keying changes and Voltage updates, so none of this was unique to AGP. Chipsets in general were more of an issue and source of problems, not AGP.
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!
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.
Would be interesting if putting the folders on another machine (PC or NAS or whatever) would also do the trick since it sound like an accesss rights issue to me.
I may make a vid on how to change files and load old abandonware games. I have been doing that forever and using WinCDEmu to mount them since I don't have a disc drive. I thought it was common lol!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
It comes and goes in waves, waves caused by console generations. A Voodoo1 was okay for anything that came out for the OG playstation. 9700pro appeared with the Xbox360 and it took years until games demanded a lot more. The same can be said for Geforce 3 and the OG Xbox or AMDs HD 7870 and the XBox one. Heck even Polaris (AMD 470...590) was fast enough for any game until the current gen XBox came out. Consoles dictate graphics fidelity for the PC too, because games and game engines are developed to run on the common denominator.
@@andreewert6576 oh, damn, that explains quite a lot of why many GPUs and CPUs seemed to become obsolete on the last 4 years, when it comes to running the newer triple A titles
@@ToniaGlitched i might have mixed up a fex consoles there, but yeah. Stay tuned for a few more years of complacency as the now current-gen consoles get maxed out, plus there are the steam deck and similar handhelds now which aren't particularly fast either. Then there comes a day when Playstation 6 and whatever MS are gonna name their next thing - let's go with Ybox, that's as sensible as anything - come along. Sure, there will always gonna be "Crysis-like" games. Cyberpunk was one of them. Nvidia pushed that hard as a dev/demo platform for RT/pathtracing/DLSS/frame gen. But the rest follows the "ebb and flow".
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 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.
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!
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.
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!
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...
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👌🏻
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 🙂
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 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 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 😢😢
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
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
Great to see a vid here again. Not sure what the problem is with your card, but it having problems in xp is not normal. Got a Radeon 9700, 9800 pro, 9800 pro 256mb, 9800 xxl and 9800 xt here that all work perfectly fine in win 98 and xp and run all the games using a athlon xp or pentium 4 platform using the modded omega drivers or medion drivers in case of the 9800 xxl. You can often still find the original replacement fan for it too, just need the fan model number from its back sticker and search for that. Ooh and yes the radeon can do more with a higher clocked cpu. The athlon xp at 2500 mhz has a 15% performance gab with the pentium 4 at 4.3 ghz in favor of the p4. Although the athlon with radeon does better in directx9 then the p4 with top range fx card.
I got my hand on some of the sought after cards like the 9700, 9800, 4600 TI, etc., but all of them had issues with most not being repairable, i.e., needing reballed or GPU chip is faulty. I gave up on finding an affordable retro card among the high end cards.
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. :)
Another Big THANK YOU to our channel artist for some retro Radeon Action: czcams.com/users/shorts-I6hTZM1MMM
Hopefully you'll run across the very last ATI agp card, the x1950 pro agp, I bought one new it was a beast.
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.
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.
Best put the zalman after market
interesting
I was about to write the same. You came first
@@Stermy57HWit’s a problem that a lot of men have, I’m told.
LOL.
Sorry. 😂
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.
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.
@@MJ-uk6lu Yeah very good company, and a very good (and well deserved) reputation.
@@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.
@@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!
Never knew that Crucial made GPUs that's interesting. Reminds me something that BFG Tech would have done because of the lifetime warranty that they offered.
gotta love when your watching a old budget builds video and see a notification for a new one
I miss the bargain bin series, but nostalgia cards are fine too. I think the format is largely what reeled me in.
Got some bargains coming up in the next few weeks
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial yay
You’re
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.
The Radeon 9600 Pro and XT are surprisingly good for their price and power consumption.
@@thegeforce6625 9600 pro gang here!! I have it on a NF7-M and a t-bred Athlon
@@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.
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.
@@galmud1508 Morrowind was the biggest memory leak ever coded.
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.
As I recall you could mod the bios and make it into a 9800XT
@@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
@@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.
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.
@@vespasian606 wtf my comments not get posted
I remember that Warning regarding the power plug, good times...
Now you just get a black screen 🥲
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.
Do you know of the top or your head if 9600 Pros are also affected?
@@armorgeddon No, That is completely different chip and this does not happen there. Most of the 9600 series cards are still running fine, except the fan off course.
This is interesting to know, thank you. I still have my original 9700 Pro in my shed somewhere, when I eventually get it out again some day I'll do this. What is the technique for removal of the metal ring, is it just pried off, or pried with heat? I imagine there are videos on the mod, but I like to ask anyway! :)
@@Sobbsy Well since this is "go bad with time" waiting is not recommended it may be dead already. First I would test it to see its still fine so that you are not wasting your time, then I would heavily load it so the thermal paste on the GPU hopefully softens up a bit, and then remove the cooler by twisting it sideways, do not pry it up, that could rip the core, twist it sideways until it lets go. As it comes to removing the ring, use a lot of solvent and razor blade to carefully cut it off without damaging the PCB under it.
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.
@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.
@@drewnewby they were asics back then, programmable shaders were pretty new back then.
@@drewnewby Can only say that's what we referred to it as.
@repatch43 Thanks, I couldn't remember exactly when it shifted.
@cal2127 True, very new then.
@@drewnewby DX 8 and GeForce 3 was when the first programmable units were introduced. If that's what you're asking. I can't remember asic being used to describe them. But if the shoe fits I guess.
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 CZcams or 480p if I downloaded the youtube video and watched it with VLC player. Thanks for bringing back those memories.
Good video.
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.
For old games and building a retro machine with that card its very achievable. those ATI 9550 goes on eBay really cheap. hmmm 🤔
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
What's wrong with AGP cards?
@@SharpShoot3r_14 Nothing. I never had a problem with any AGP card. The worst thing was early VIA chipsets with suggestions to run them at a lower AGP speed for stability, but I never did and never had a problem. I think drivers helped those that did have problems. Of course there were motherboard manufacturers that didn't use ta he correct keyed slots, so some 5V boards would accept a 3.3V card, while not having a universal slot, and kill the card. That's still not an AGP problem. Many other interfaces go through keying changes and Voltage updates, so none of this was unique to AGP.
Chipsets in general were more of an issue and source of problems, not AGP.
Bet on a cold winter night you do sometimes, such good heaters they were!
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!
Budget builds, you have been a huge inspiration to me and I have started my own tech Chanel. Love your work mate
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.
Would be interesting if putting the folders on another machine (PC or NAS or whatever) would also do the trick since it sound like an accesss rights issue to me.
I may make a vid on how to change files and load old abandonware games. I have been doing that forever and using WinCDEmu to mount them since I don't have a disc drive. I thought it was common lol!
@armorgeddon some old stuff can be zipped and changed because different emulators like dolphin can launch compressed iso files.
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.
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
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.
welcome back. good to see regular uploads again
Love the videos , just finished watchin the whole backlog. glad to see your back with frequent uploads. love the new 3d retro graphics !
one of the main people who got me into pc building and messing around with parts, glad to see you back man
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.
A lot of new videos lately, not complaining at all, always a great watch!
love the uploading schedule recently
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
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.
It comes and goes in waves, waves caused by console generations. A Voodoo1 was okay for anything that came out for the OG playstation. 9700pro appeared with the Xbox360 and it took years until games demanded a lot more. The same can be said for Geforce 3 and the OG Xbox or AMDs HD 7870 and the XBox one. Heck even Polaris (AMD 470...590) was fast enough for any game until the current gen XBox came out.
Consoles dictate graphics fidelity for the PC too, because games and game engines are developed to run on the common denominator.
@@andreewert6576 oh, damn, that explains quite a lot of why many GPUs and CPUs seemed to become obsolete on the last 4 years, when it comes to running the newer triple A titles
@@ToniaGlitched i might have mixed up a fex consoles there, but yeah. Stay tuned for a few more years of complacency as the now current-gen consoles get maxed out, plus there are the steam deck and similar handhelds now which aren't particularly fast either.
Then there comes a day when Playstation 6 and whatever MS are gonna name their next thing - let's go with Ybox, that's as sensible as anything - come along.
Sure, there will always gonna be "Crysis-like" games. Cyberpunk was one of them. Nvidia pushed that hard as a dev/demo platform for RT/pathtracing/DLSS/frame gen. But the rest follows the "ebb and flow".
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!
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.
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
I had the 9500, did the mod to enable the remaining 4 cores and OCit, what a beast for half the cost
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.
The castle intro for the original unreal was so cool back in the day.
@@volvo09
For me still it is especially on god CRT. And retro hardware.
Don't know nostalgia kicks in hard, simpler times
@@RaPtOr9600 The musical mod soundtrack of Unreal was absolutely the best of its time, can't forget some of those moments in the game.
@@spikester Same here, sometimes i listen to soundtracks from Unreal 1 And UT99 in gym
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!
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.
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!
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...
finally you go back to your regular videos :) keep up and stay doing some new gpus and more more tests :)
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.
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👌🏻
@@jonchapman6821 Oh that sounds sweet. When I have the space, I will definitely do a similar build man. Thanks for the info.
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 :)
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.
Extra thumb up for discovered installing from virtual drive trick.
I still have that Compaq Presario case, I love how simple it is and the piano black look is sleek.
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.
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.
@@gorjy9610
Very true.
@@gorjy9610 Modern cards heat rarely matters (atleast below 90c) as most modern issues are factory issues or just straight up die cracks
man clean the keyboard xD
great video gotta love these agp cards
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.
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!
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 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
CZcams suggested your video from 2019-2020 and I watched all videos :)
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!
Nothing like playing Crysis on a 9500 upped to 9700 pro!
I had one of these...and of course did the 9500Pro to 9700Pro upgrade to many friends.
I am absolutely loving the PS1 Tomb Raider Menu type 3D model in the specs rundown - looks awesome!
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.
I used to have one of those cards! I was so happy the day I installed it.
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.
That fan falling off 😂 top comedy!
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.
Yessss new upload! Youre spoiling us with so much content, please keep it coming!
I had one of these back in the day, truly a special piece of hardware.
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.
The wobble when you're showing the card reminds me of the ps1 graphics
I still remember that speed bump when I went from GF4 Ti 4200 to a R9700 Pro. Like a day and night difference.
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.
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.
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.
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. 🙂
I still have a PC with that red PCB in it 🥲 It doesn't even start/boot/ nothing works. I changed CMOS battery. I suspect the power supply is dead 🙂😮💨
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 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 had one of those, brings back some great memories..
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 remember the first computer I ever built with an AMD Athlon 2800+, 1.5GB of RAM, and a 9700 Pro. Good times.
Really digging the new visuals
I loved my... 9800 PRO!! :D Bit surprised you didn't go for the 9800 Pro instead, since that was the TRUE CHAMP.
I did actually use a 9800Pro for years, it was brilliant. Mine was in a PowerMac G5 though.
9700Pro was an amazing card! , still have mine packed away, was still working last time I checked.
Noticed at 9:44 you had the Enemy and Fear books under the desk. I didnt know you were a Charlie Higson fan!
Not my desk unfortunately.
Radeon 9200 SE 64mb was my card as a kid. Loved that card even though it was limited.
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'm pretty sure I have one of these in the loft still in its original box, I'll have to go have a look at the weekend.
Omg at 5:48, I thought the card was falling for a second LOL
also lol at the very last clip with the fan falling out. "well that's gone... wrong."
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
Thank you for that 👍
Can you add the year the game released to the benchmarks so we get an idea of how a card held up over time?
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.
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).
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.
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 had the All-In-Wonder version of this back in the day 😊
Got a Sapphire 9800SE still running in my old AthlonXP system. Those high 9000 series cards were tanks like the 5xxX series cards
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.
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.
I still remember when I bought the Hercules Prophet 9700 PRO... It was the best card in the market back in 2003
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.
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 the "all-in-wonder" version of this card.
I used it for many years before finally upgrading.
I had a Sapphire 9600 XT OC and it was an absolute CnC Zero Hour beast!
Had one of those in my old first series Dell XPS laptop. Oh the days
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.
Ooo I had a 9800 pro aiw when I built my first PC out of high school lol
It's nice he started uploading more and more interesting content
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!!
huh, Ive always been using isos and wondered why people have so much issues with their install, your discovery would explain so much lol
Great video on an under-appreciated card these days. It absolutely decimated Nvidia upon release. Thank you!
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.
Great to see a vid here again. Not sure what the problem is with your card, but it having problems in xp is not normal. Got a Radeon 9700, 9800 pro, 9800 pro 256mb, 9800 xxl and 9800 xt here that all work perfectly fine in win 98 and xp and run all the games using a athlon xp or pentium 4 platform using the modded omega drivers or medion drivers in case of the 9800 xxl. You can often still find the original replacement fan for it too, just need the fan model number from its back sticker and search for that. Ooh and yes the radeon can do more with a higher clocked cpu. The athlon xp at 2500 mhz has a 15% performance gab with the pentium 4 at 4.3 ghz in favor of the p4. Although the athlon with radeon does better in directx9 then the p4 with top range fx card.
I got my hand on some of the sought after cards like the 9700, 9800, 4600 TI, etc., but all of them had issues with most not being repairable, i.e., needing reballed or GPU chip is faulty. I gave up on finding an affordable retro card among the high end cards.
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. :)