ATI RADEON 9200

The RADEON 9200 is in fact the well-known RADEON 9000 under another name and with support of AGP 8x. Here are the basic characteristics of the chip, in brief: 4 pixel pipelines with one texture-mapping unit per each, support of DirectX 8 version 1.4 pixel and version 1.1 vertex shaders. Notwithstanding the higher index in the name, the RADEON 9200 overall loses in performance to the RADEON 9100 (which is a renamed RADEON 8500 with the same additional AGP 8x support), because the latter has similar functionality, but also has two texture-mapping units per pipeline. Thus the RADEON 9100 is faster at multi-texturing, which is used in a majority of today’s games.

That said, the RADEON 8500/9100, unlike the RADEON 9000/9200, has a status of a “Discontinued Product” – it is obsolete and is not supported by the manufacturing company.

So, the RADEON 9200 comes to us on a graphics card from PowerColor:

You may bet that this card won’t be a leader in our today tests, but it looks much better than the two previous, “cut-down” cards. Once this card belonged to a higher class – the good soldering, relatively complex PCB design, VIVO functionality (thanks to the ATI Rage Theater chip) all confirm this point. Well, we are all growing old as the ex-leaders, RADEON 9800 XT and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, may say now after being utterly defeated by the newcomer, the NV40.

But back to the RADEON 9200. The card from PowerColor is endowed with 128MB of graphics memory in DDR SDRAM chips from Elixir with a cycle time of 5ns (Elixir N2DS12H16BT-5T). The nominal frequencies of the core and memory are 250/400 (200DDR) MHz. The GPU showed a considerable frequency growth at overclocking, up to 320MHz, but the memory was unstable even at 410MHz. As a result, the maximum stable frequencies were 320/400MHz.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra GDD3

The opposite camp, graphics cards on GPUs from NVIDIA Corp., is represented by several products, too. Leadtek supplied the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra graphics card with GDDR3 memory:

This card follows the reference design and in fact doesn’t differ from any other graphics card on the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra save for the memory type. GDDR3 on GeForce FX 5700 Ultra cards can’t make wonders on the overclocking field. NVIDIA just tries its new memory and get experienced with GDDR3 chips that have numerous advantages over old DDR2 including lower energy consumption and heat dissipation.

Memory chips are only on the face side of the card, but this is no indication of a reduction of the memory bus – they gathered the same amount of graphics memory using few higher-capacity chips (the bus is 128 bits wide; there are four 32-bit chips from Samsung with a cycle time of 2ns, Samsung K4J55323QF-GC20). The nominal frequencies of the graphics processors and memory are 475/950 (475DDR) MHz. Thus, the graphics memory works at a 50MHz higher clock rate than on cards with DDR2. This card did well in our overclocking tests, reaching 560/1100MHz frequencies.