ATi Mobility Radeon 9700

Introduction & Specifications

 

The PC has undergone quite a metamorphosis recently.  Over the past few years, we've seen the boring beige boxes of yesterday, transform into the multi-colored, windowed and lighted works of art of today.  We've also seen (or should we say heard?) the community move away from multi-fan, super-loud cooling techniques, to more intelligently designed and near silent methods that are much easier on the ears.  And now, more and more users are even trading in their monstrous full-towers in favor of the much smaller and more provocative SFF systems available from companies like Shuttle, Biostar and Iwill.  With so many PC users making the move to distinctive, silent, and small systems, the recent boom in notebook popularity should come as no surprise.  These trends, coupled with the fact that ATi and NVIDIA have both been hard at work producing mobile GPUs that rival the performance and feature sets of some of their desktop counterparts, have spawned the present day "desktop replacement" notebooks.  These machines are packed with high-end CPUs, large hard drives, plenty of memory and have large high-resolution screens.    We recently got our hands on one of these beasts, with an ATi Mobility Radeon 9700 beating at its heart.  So, we fired-up some popular games to see just what ATi's current flagship mobile GPU could do...

Specifications of the Mobility Radeon 9700
ATi's M11 Mobile GPU
The MOBILITY RADEON™ 9700 gives you the freedom to create, communicate and entertain, anywhere, anytime:

Unprecedented Graphic Processing Power in a Notebook
_Low-K Technology delivers the fastest mobile performance and longer battery life
_Up to 30% faster than its highly acclaimed predecessor
_Supports the Microsoft DirectX 9.0 programming standard which will drive the most demanding next generation games
_Enough processing power to turn your notebook into a mobile video editing studio

Share the Visual Wealth
_Enable Hollywood feature-film quality realism without compromising performance
_Bring streamed video, and the latest games roaring to life
_Complex lighting and shading technology effects are seamlessly delivered at blistering frame rates
_Create dynamic presentations with superb 3D motion visuals

Higher Performance with Longer Battery Life
_ATI's POWERPLAY™ technology continually monitors the workload on your notebook by automatically adjusting clock speeds and voltages based on your level of activity to extend battery life even longer.

Get Connected To All of the Latest Displays
_Take your notebook on the road knowing that your system connects to any projector
_Be the first to connect a notebook* to wide-screen HDTV
_Use the HYDRAVISION™ feature to connect to multiple monitors for presentations and to increase your productivity (OEM Option)

Premium 3D Performance
_Offering up to a 30% MHz boost over its predecessor•_Supports Microsoft DirectX 9.0
_Pixel and Vertex Shaders
_Quad rendering & dual vertex engines
_Full precision floating point with full performance
_0.13 micron VPU featuring Low-K process technology
_Fastest 3D engine speed
_Low power operation
_Support for AGP 8X

SMARTSHADER™ 2.0
_Provides comprehensive hardware accelerated support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0.
_Full supported by OpenGL using custom extensions
_Up to 16 textures per pixel
_Enables advanced Microsoft DirectX 9.0 effects such as multiple render targets, user clip planes and high dimension floating point textures

SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1
_Multisampling with 6 unique samples per pixel and ATI's patented gamma correction
_Eliminates "jaggies" on the edges of objects and other visual artifacts for smoother-looking images without compromising performance
_16X Anisotropic filtering improves image quality by sharpening blurry textures to bring out finer detail

POWERPLAY™ 4.0
_ATI's fourth-generation POWERPLAY™ power management technology provides users with the optimal balance between performance and power consumption
_Multiple power-saving settings offer increased control and flexibility
POWER-ON-DEMAND - Constantly monitors system activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario

LOW POWER LCD – enables lower LCD refresh rate for longer battery life

ATI OVERDRIVE™ – on-chip thermal sensor enables performance to scale up dependent on notebook thermal environment

Razor-Sharp Visual Quality
_HYDRAVISION™ software which provides the most flexible and easy-to-use interface for multiple display settings
_Integrated dual-channel LVDS, with support for notebook LCD panels as up to QXGA resolutions (2048x1536)
_165 MHz integrated TMDS transmitter, for support of DVI Digital Flat Panels at up to UXGA resolution (1600x1200)
_Integrated TV-Out Encoder
_Dual RAMDACs at speeds of 400MHz
_Integrated HDTV encoder, supporting component output (YPbPr) for both North American and Japanese D-link connectors

Accelerated Home & Business Multimedia
_Hardware acceleration for MPEG encoding and decoding, for DVD playback, personal video recorder and time-shifting applications
_Video Input Port for notebook TVtuner solutions
_FULLSTREAM™ - hardware accelerated video de-blocking for enhanced Internet streaming video quality
_Optimized support for wide-aspect LCD panels and HDTV output

Multiple Variants For Ultimate Design Flexibility:
MOBILITY™ RADEON™ 9700 series is ATI's eight generation of mobile graphics with integrated on-chip memory delivering true flexibility for numerous mobile form factors, from full size to "thin-and-light".
_Discrete
_On-chip 64MB DDR (128-bit)
_On-chip 128MB DDR (128-bit)

SMARTSHADER Effects
_Control panel allows gamers to enable exciting pixel shader effects in Direct3D or OpenGL applications

VPU RECOVER
_Automatically activated if the graphics processor hangs, triggering the driver to reset the VPU, avoiding system "crash"

FLEXFIT™:
Enabling The Upgradeable Notebook
Using ATI's innovative FLEXFIT™ technology, notebook vendors can deliver the future with upgradeable notebook designs while ensuring time and cost savings for their customers.
_Save design costs: use one motherboard design for all market segments – high-end, mainstream, and value
Faster time to market: deliver better performing systems to users more quickly
_One driver architecture and interface for all systems: ensures less qualification time and easier product migration with users
_Performance, technologies and features listed above can vary with specific notebook implementations. Please consult with Notebook vendor for a complete list of supported features.

     

 


  

  

  

Before we get into the specifics, we thought we give you a glimpse of the notebook we used to test the ATi Mobility Radeon 9700.  These are images of Eurocom's upgradeable D870P Mirage, a notebook Eurocom likes to call a "mobile workstation".  We guess Eurocom doesn't consider the term "desktop replacement" befitting of this powerhouse!  This behemoth is packed with 1GB of RAM, a 3.2GHz "Northwood" Pentium 4, dual 60GB hard drives and a DVD/CD burner, along with the Mobility Radeon 9700.  We should also mention that the Mobility Radeon 9700 installed in this laptop is equipped with a full 256MB of DDR RAM, not the 32MB or 64MB normally found in less powerful notebooks.  This D870P also has an integrated 6-in-1 card reader, a built-in 300K pixel Video Camera and the screen is a gorgeous 17" wide with a native resolution of 1440 x 900 (WXGA).  It's got video in, DVI Out, Gigabit LAN - you name it.  This is definitely a capable machine, and a platform worthy of the Mobility Radeon 9700.  With all these goodies, comes some heft, however.  This particular model is a bear to carry at around 12lbs, and with all of the fans spinning, it's definitely not one of the quietest notebook we've worked with.


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