Gigabyte GR-R9500 Maya II

ATI's Radeon 9500 chip is a slimmed-down version of its DirectX 9-compatible 9700 chip, released to address the mainstream market.

The Radeon 9500 we tested was Gigabyte's GV-R9500 Maya II, boxed with Cyberlink PowerDVD XP, four games, TV connection cables and a DVI to VGA adaptor.

The 9500 uses the same R300 GPU as the 9700, but with some cut-down features.

Instead of the four 64bit DDR memory controllers of the 9700 Pro it has two, cutting the memory bandwidth in half and bringing it in line with Nvidia's Geforce4 Ti range.

The 9500 also loses half of the rendering pipelines, from eight down to four, something you will notice if you play games with lots of per-pixel and texture effects.

DirectX 9 compliance makes the 9500 unique in the price range, even though the chip's clock speed has been reduced to just 275MHz.

It comes with 64MB of DDR memory onboard, although the 9500 Pro version has 128MB. Even at the reduced speed though, the 9500 still requires the additional power connector that the 9700 had to its rear.

The rest of the features remain much the same as the Radeon 9700. Smartshader 2.0 provides programmable DirectX 9 effects, AGP 8x support and Videoshader, which allows the shader hardware to smooth streaming video. The three outputs remain the same too - DVI-I out, S-Video out and D-Sub out.

As this was pre-production board, drivers were not final and hence it could not complete the Jedi Knight or Comanche 4 tests.

However, the tests it did complete showed that it's ahead of the pack. Its score of over 10,000 in 3Dmark makes it great value.

SPECS

• Core 275MHz
• 270MHz Ramdacs
• 64MB DDR SD-Ram working at 540MHz
• 8.64Gbytes/sec memory bandwidth
• VGA, DVI, S-Video outputs
• DirectX 9
• OpenGL
• AGP 4x and 8x compatible

DETAILS

PRICE: £150.40 (£128 ex VAT)

CONTACT Gigabyte 01908 362 700
www.gbt-tech.co.uk