Not so long ago Creative made up its mind to start selling ATI based graphics cards under its own brand name. They seemed to be pretty happy with their first experience there, because now they announced the shipments of the new solution, ATI RADEON 9000 Pro based card.

The graphics card specifications are quite standard (275MHz/550MHz DDR, 64MB, D-Sub, DVI-I, TV-Out), which is not bad at all, because everybody is pretty tired of the confusions in ATI’s product range. The actual manufacturer of these graphics cards is most likely to be Gigabyte Company, and Creative contributed a beautiful box and a company name on top of the cooler.

By the way, note that the number of Creative 3D Blaster 5 RX9000 Pro has got one unit bigger now. Creative’s graphics cards based on NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti, GeForce4 MX and a card on ATI RADEON 7500LE were all marked with "4". And if the latter shouldn’t be upset with this discrimination as it belongs to the older chips generation, then GeForce4 Ti chips have every right to express their discontent, because RADEON 9000 Pro is actually none other but the same RADEON 8500, which is definitely not faster and not newer than any GeForce4 Ti. Of course it’s clear that when they designed 3D Blaster 5 family, they supposed that the chip would be launched later and it will be the really new RADEON 9700. But now… Anyway, if both cards had appeared simultaneously, then yes, it could have made more sense…

Anyway, it is up to the Creative Company what name to assign to their products. Especially, since they have nothing to do with their actual production. The expected retail price of Creative 3D Blaster 5 RX9000 Pro in the Japanese market makes around $138.