ATI Delivers: The Radeon 9500 PRO

The New 9500 PRO Card

Now ATI has released the finalized version of the 9500 PRO. Thanks to the reduced memory bandwidth, the new board is much cheaper to produce, as it only has half the number of pipelines to the memory modules as the 9700. Apart from a revised layout for the memory modules and the voltage converter, the differences don't appear to be very major. ATI has also now decided to dispense with the heatsink at the rear of the card behind the converter.

The components on the Radeon 9500 Pro are arranged differently than those on the Radeon 9700 PRO.

The Radeon 9700 PRO for comparsion.

The backside of the card. You can see that it's using fewer wires from the chip to the memory modules than on a R9700 PCB.

The card is equipped with 3.6ns DDR BGA memory modules made by Hynix.

The voltage regulators are located close to the chip on the Radeon 9500 PRO PCB.