Gigabyte GV-R9700 Pro

nVidia's dominance in graphics cards over the past two years is indisputable. Since the launch of the GeForce 256 Annihilator in late 1999, rivals have been playing catch up and ATi seems to have taken a huge leap forward with its new Radeon 9700 chip.

The Gigabyte GV-9700 Pro uses the 9700 chip and is one of the first cards available in the UK. At £350, this is no pocket money upgrade. It has a massive 128Mb of DDR memory on board and the 9700 chip has more transistors than a Pentium 4 processor so, in some respects, it's as complex as a PC in its own right.

You'll need a modern PC to get the best from the Gigabyte. One of the unusual requirements is for a 300-watt power supply alongside the normal AGP slot and 128MB of memory.

The Radeon 9700 Pro also supports the new AGP 8x standard that we shall see appearing in new computers later in the year. This new standard allows twice as much information to flow between the memory card and processor, with better games performance as a result.

The Gigabyte is the fastest 3D card we have ever seen. It eclipsed our previous best benchmark figures for GeForce 4 Ti 4600-based cards by over 20 per cent. Every game we tried allowed us to turn on every quality setting and still run them as fast as we liked. It is very impressive indeed.

It has a choice of DVI, S-video and standard VGA connectors. We were pleased to see that the drivers also performed flawlessly, as ATi-based cards have sometimes struggled in this respect.

nVidia is due to release a new chip in the next few months but, until then, the Radeon 9700 cards are the fastest available. If you demand the greatest graphics for your games, this is the best there is. How long this is the case remains to be seen.

Price: £306 (incl. VAT)

Contact: Gigabyte UK 01908 362700
www.gbt-tech.co.uk

Also consider: Gainward GeForce 4 750XP
A fast GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card.