Should I buy a 9500 Pro?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mac Cool
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Mac Cool

I have a Ti4200 which has held it's own very well for the 2.5 years I've
had it, but I'm thinking of upgrading to a DX9 card and I hope to only
spend ~$100. I'm eyeing a 9500Pro. Benchmarks put it slightly above a
9600XT, slightly better than an FX5700 and close to an FX5900.

They can be found for close to a hundred bucks but they don't seem to be
very popular. Are there any negatives to this card?
 
i dont think they make it anymore, but i bet u can find it somewhere.. .i
hear it has 8 pipelines but only 4 are enabled, and u can turn it into a
9800 pro (which has 8 pipelines) with a tiny flash. never tried it nor can
confirm if it is true, but it seems like a good deal for 100 bucks if u can
do that.
 
9500 non-pros could be flashed to 9700 pros but most didn't work without
artifacts. Unfortunately mine was one of those so I returned it for the
9500 pro which has 8 working pipelines but only 128 bit memory access which
made it slower than the 9700 pro (8 pipelines, 256bit memory) but almost as
expensive to make which is why ATI stopped making them asap. It's a great
card if you can find one. If you flash the bios with an aftermarket bios
you can often overclock to almost 9700 levels but it's still going to be a
little slower.
http://rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33654157
I never tried this because my amd xp2200+ and ecsk7s5a can't keep up with
the stock 9500 pro.
 
Mac Cool said:
I have a Ti4200 which has held it's own very well for the 2.5 years I've
had it, but I'm thinking of upgrading to a DX9 card and I hope to only
spend ~$100. I'm eyeing a 9500Pro. Benchmarks put it slightly above a
9600XT, slightly better than an FX5700 and close to an FX5900.
Click to expand...

It's a decent card, but you're off base about it's performance. Don't know
of too many tests showing a 9500 Pro outperforming a 9600XT, 5700 or even
remotely close to a 5900. Check out Tom's Hardware comparisons for yourself.

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/vga-charts-01.html
 
Augustus said:
It's a decent card, but you're off base about it's performance.
Don't know of too many tests showing a 9500 Pro outperforming a
9600XT, 5700 or even remotely close to a 5900. Check out Tom's
Hardware comparisons for yourself.

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/vga-charts-01.html
Click to expand...

I checked them out myself and they substantiate everything I wrote. In
most of the benchmarks the 9500Pro either ties or beats the 9600XT, in
most of the benchmarks the 9500Pro soundly beats the 5700 and 5700U, in
the High Quality (4xFSAA + 8x Anis) UT2K3 benchmarks the 9500Pro comes
within 3fps of the 5900. I would say it's a damn good card for the money,
wouldn't you?
 
Depends on what your spending. You can probably get a 9700 pro or np for
about 100 bucks now on ebay and have a finer card for the same amount of
money..
 
Yeah, I had a 9500 pro (still have it in the spare rig) and it was a wonderful overclocker,
especially when I put an arctic cooler on it. The cards cannot be modded as such (they already have
all 8 pipelines enabled), although you tended to have to Flash them anyway because the BIOS on a lot
of them prevented you overclocking.

They are 'not commonly available' rather than 'not popular', because ATI stopped producing them
rather quikcly, although they are generally better than the 9600s, which are basically cheaper
versions of the same thing (the switch was for economic reasons to do with fabrication). Oh, there
was also a batch of early 9500 pros with banding issues (you got a very faint band going down the
screen if you were displaying white backgrounds - such as when you are word processing). The issue
there was that some idiot removed a big capacitor in the RF circuitry to save on costs, and it was
very quickly fixed. IF you are buying on Ebay, I would certainly ask the seller if they see banding
on the card before you start bidding, especially if you use authoring software as well as games. If
you look at the NG archives and search on 'banding' or 'RF noise' you will probably get all the info
you need to be aware of the issue)

I remember being pleasantly surprised with my 9500 pro being able to play the Far cry demo well at
relatively high settings, although I have subsequently upgraded to a 9800 pro. That was due to the
tempting price differential between the two, and despite everything good about the 9500 pro, I would
certainly recommend a 9800 pro if you want a cheap upgrade but also want to protect your investment
for a while. The only issue with the 9800 pro is that it is a very hot card and you really need to
take the stock heatsink off and put an arctic on it, as some of the other posts about Doom 3 are
showing up

S
 
Hi,
I have a 9700 pro Hurcules 3D Prophet with Zalman heatsink for sale after
upgrading to x800pro.

£60.00 and it's goes to who ever pays via Paypal first or cheque cleared.

Spence
 
Sam said:
What makes you say that? I own this card and the specifications for it
say that it has DirectX 9 support.
Click to expand...

DaveW appears to be a 'bot that posts this nonsense every time anybody asks
a question about an ATI board and DX9. He apologized a while back but now
he's back to it. Just plonk the twit.
 
Mac said:
I have a Ti4200 which has held it's own very well for the 2.5 years I've
had it, but I'm thinking of upgrading to a DX9 card and I hope to only
spend ~$100. I'm eyeing a 9500Pro. Benchmarks put it slightly above a
9600XT, slightly better than an FX5700 and close to an FX5900.

They can be found for close to a hundred bucks but they don't seem to be
very popular. Are there any negatives to this card?
Click to expand...

It's out of production and a generation and a half old. The 9500s use the
same chip as the 9700s, but the pros are permanently crippled--some of the
non-pros would softmod into 9700s. The 9600/9800 came out very shortly
after the 9500/9700 to address what was essentially a marketing issue--the
GeForce FX supported a greater instruction count in the pixel shader than
did the 9500/9700, so the new chip for the 9600/9800 addressed that.
 
Gareee© said:
I though the 9600 xt was...
Click to expand...

No. 9600XT is a faster 9600 with onboard temperature monitoring. And a
9600 is a crippled 9700 with more instruction depth in the pixel shader.

The R300 was ATI's first DX9 chip, used in the Radeon 9500 and 9700 series.
Nvidia was crowing about how much "better" their pixel shader was so ATI
brought out the R350 with an improved shader to knock the wind out of their
sales:) At the same time, the R300-based 9500s were far too easy to mod
into 9700s so ATI brought out the RV350 which is crippled at the silicon
level and so not moddable into a 9800. Later, they went to a new
manufacturing process that allows higher clock speeds, which led to the
R360 and RV360 chips used in the XTs--other than the new manufacturing
process the only real change is the onboard temperature monitor. Now all
ATI production is based on the 360 series and many non-XT boards can be
soft-modded into XTs as a result.
 
Gareee© said:
I thought it did.. I just bought 2 new cards.. sure hope they do!
Click to expand...

Anybody who tells you that any ATI board with a number "9500" or higher does
_not_ have DirectX 9 support is lying to you.
 
The 9500 pro was not crippled, it used the same gpu as the 9700 pro but
used 128 bit memory instead of the 256 bit memory of the 9700 pro. It had
the full 8 pipelines enabled unlike the 9500 which required a mod to enable
them but only if the 9500 was using a 9700 pcb.

Rob.
 
Mustafa said:
The 9500 pro was not crippled, it used the same gpu as the 9700 pro but
used 128 bit memory instead of the 256 bit memory of the 9700 pro.
Click to expand...

Which constitutes crippling.
 
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