Review - FIC A95P Radeon 9500 Pro 128 MB

Review by Edward Chang, call sign: Big_E

May 12, 2003

The Card:

This card looks slightly different from the Radeon 9700. The four memory chips are aligned in a row versus having two chips top and right of the core. This change obviously relocates transistors, voltage regulators, and capacitors. For clarification, this version cannot be modified into a Radeon 9700. Like the Radeon 9700, this card also needs more juice to run, so it requires the additional voltage from this type of power source. The placement of the power connector has migrated from the upper-right corner to a middle-top position.

So what happens if the additional power is not provided you might ask. Well, the computer simply will not post with the video card installed and a warning will appear on the screen asking for the power to be connected. Interestingly, the warning refers to this card as a Radeon 9700.

The FIC Radeon A95P is equipped with 8-chips of Infinieon 3.0-nanosecond DDR SGRAM. This memory rating corresponds to a maximum operating frequency of 333 MHz (666 MHz DDR). 

The Radeon 9500 core is nearly identical to the Radeon 9700 Pro's core. People who modify their Radeon 9500 into a Radeon 9700 say the only hardware difference between these two cards is the placement of a resistor on the core's package. Speaking of differences, the Radeon 9500 Pro is like a Radeon 9700 Pro, but with half the memory bandwidth: 128-bit versus 256-bit on the Radeon 9700 Pro.

Overclocking:

Initially, we had extreme difficulty overclocking this video card. Upon further investigation, we learned that the existing BIOS on this Radeon 9500 Pro impedes any overclock attempt, no matter how minimal the increase in frequency.  By flashing the BIOS to a more overclock friendly version, our TechwareLabs review unit ran fine overclocked to 325 core and 300 memory using PowerStrip. We do not take responsibility for any damages incurred from overclocking.

Time to check out the Radeon 9500's brethren and competition.