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ATi Radeon 9000 Pro by Sapphire

ATi Radeon 9000 Pro by X-Bit Labs

So, ATI RADEON 9000 PRO chip has good overclocking potential and shows appropriate performance gain. The Sapphire RADEON 9000 Atlantis PRO graphics card based on this chip is an excellent proof of the fact.

Of course, we might wish something more than 23.6% frequency increase and about 20% performance growth. Those are not the figures we are used to during extreme overclocking and voltage increase, as we usually look forward to some more striking results. However, let me remind you that firstly, I raised the voltages not too "extremely" and didn't want to reach the very maximum frequencies at any rate and secondly, the card I had at my disposal was an ordinary product from an ordinary manufacturer and it claimed no "high overclocking potential".

Nevertheless, our overclocked card fell just a little behind ATI RADEON 8500 LE 128MB in Quake3 Arena, left it far behind in Serious Sam: The Second Encounter and outperformed it in 3DMark2001 SE (Nature).

By the way, one more thing worth mentioning: ATI RADEON 9000 PRO chip used in the tested card from Sapphire was stable working at the nominal frequency even when we reduced the chip voltage down to 1.4V. I also dismantled the active cooling from the chip and installed a small passive heatsink they usually use in NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200/MX400 based cards. There were no problems or complaints about the card's performance in these conditions.

So, all of you who are irritated by the noise produced by the system block, who have already made all other devices shut up and want to do the same with the graphics card, may take an ATI RADEON 9000 PRO based card and eradicate the noise in such an original way.