3d prophet 9700pro or just the ATI version?

ive heard that the 3d prophet version of some gfx cards put hair on their chest and make them grow serious balls?
and theyre cheaper than the ATI version too :)

can someone just clear this up for me please

cheers

anyone got any ideas?
im not having much luck in finding a comparison between these cards to see if there is actually any difference in them.

They are the same.

The boards are almost exact, at most differnt speed ram chips. They layout should be quite close if not exact match of the reference design and the components should be just as good.

The only noticable difference is that the cooler should be a little better than the reference one, but Id advsise you to get an artic cooling silencer as they are much better and only cost £5.

You probably relise that these are old cards and at stock arnt really going to manage many of the latest games with max detail. however with a little overclocking they will reach 9800XT speeds on core - with ease, although memory usually will not go past 9700pro by any noticable amount. This results in a card about as good as a 9800pro, maybe slightly better - mine was getting 6.4k in 3dm2k3.

The gpu on 9700 and 9800 cards is the same, the differences are in other components and layout which is how they achive higher clock speeds AND get high yeilds to make it possible to mass produce them for that speed.

I've got a Hercules 9700, and is appears to match the reference design, right down to the PCB colour... though you do get copper heatsinks for the RAM and backside of the GPU, I'm not sure whether you get those on other 9700s or not... You also get a funky little copper heatsink for the processor, but the fan was a bit whiney, so I replaced it with an Arctic Cooler. Overclocked, it'll run at around 360Mhz Core and 345Mhz RAM, which is okay... But if you've got the money, a 9800 would be better... Or maybe one of the new nVidia 6600s?

not got alot of cash right now so it was gonna be one of these, i know theyre a pretty old card, but i thought they'd hold up pretty well even now, not with games on full settings but a decent level?

I'm running my 9700 with an AMD 2500+ and it'll run current games okay, just not with all the graphics options turned on... Running at 1024x768 with medium graphics and no anti-aliasing will get you decent frame rates...

thats cool akuma, im not a massive gamer, but do occasionally.
just looking for a decent enough card to run them ok.
but like ive said above, i have heard that the 3d prophet cards are better than the other ones, but thats turned out to be untrue.
:)

cheers guys