Gigabyte Maya II R9500 Video Card Review
By: Dmitry Zinovyev
There is no and can't be the ideal 'price to quality' relation for an offered goods. That is, if you want to buy a good graphics accelerator cheap, you won't get it. It's always possible to get a poor goods at high price though. This is reality where it's sometimes very difficult to find the right balance between the price and quality. There is no concept of good and bad here, they are all replaced with lots of notions, and if you go deep down them you'll either get mixed up completely or spend an awful lot of time which could have been used for better advantage and pleasure. Many see the future where the whole gaming industry as well as the industry of professional graphics are moving in the ability to make a scene as realistic as possible, so thousands of man-years and immense engineering efforts of largest leading chip development companies are being spent. That's why Microsoft released the new API - DirectX9, with ATI and Nvidia backing it up with their R300 and NV30 chips. While NV30 chips have not yet seen the retail shops, ATI has been selling its offsprings for quite a while to all those after on-screen realism.
Every company has its own flagship product that attracts the public by its performance and potentials. And if we join the arguments between the two companies as to whose product is better, it makes sense comparing just the flagship products of theirs. All the remaining squadron remains in the shade. Today we'll be looking into a product that has no analogs, and not because there aren't video cards more productive than that, but because there are no cards offering this 'price-quality-functionality' ratio. Note that I don't mean to say this ratio is the best, - I mean it has no analogs. This is the ATI 9500 Pro.
As is known, the ATI R300 chip underlying the 9500 and 9700 video cards is in a way revolutionary, and its revolutionary character is just about the ability to make use of cutting-edge technologies improving the visualization quality, e.g. programmable vertex and pixel shaders etc., but the major trait that makes the new generation of accelerators stand out is the full-featured support for API DirectX 9. The flagship product ATI 9700 Pro is still rather costly for today to persuade the people who buy new computers or upgrade the existing choose it for their needs. Very few can afford to fork around $350+ for this video card - that take up almost one third or even half the price of the whole computer. Anyway, many want to get a video card that won't restrict the user functionally for at least the coming one and a half year, even though the card is going to be a performance overkill. So, to get a better idea of the differences between the 9500 and 9700 series, look at the below table.
| Name |
RADEON 9700 PRO |
RADEON 9700 |
RADEON 9500 PRO |
RADEON 9500 |
| Memory capacity, MB |
128 |
128 |
64128 |
64 |
| Chip frequency, MHz |
325 |
275 |
275 |
275 |
| Memory frequency, MHz (DDR) |
310 (620) |
270 (540) |
270 (540) |
270 (540) |
| Bit-rate of the local memory, bit |
256 |
256 |
128 |
128 |
| Q-ty of pipelines |
8 |
8 |
8 |
4 |
| HyperZ |
yes |
yes |
yes |
No | As is seen from this table, today we're testing a card the weakest of the whole ATI's R300 line. Theoretically, we can expect its performance to be a bit as twice as low compared to the top-end ATI9700 Pro card and on par with 8500 cards. For details of the potentials demonstrated by video cards based on the R300 chip, read the materials on our web-site. But we are now moving on to the particulars.
Gigabyte Maya II R9500
As always, let's first run through the package bundle. The card comes shipped in a standard box bearing the Maya logo and is colored to dark tints.
In the part of packaging, Gigabyte has gone slightly against the established fashion and released an easy to open box. Gigabyte does not supply this card wrapped in an inner box the way Abit or Asus do. For a card positioned as the cheapest of the line, the package bundle appears to be quite good. It includes:
- A DVI -> D-Sub adapter for plugging in a second monitor.
- A S-Video + Composite cable for plugging in a TV-set.
- A drivers CD.
- PowerDVD xp 4.0 (DVD player).
- Serious Sam (Game).
- Rune (Game).
- Oni (Game).
- 4x4 EVO (Game).
 The card itself is made in ATI's smart PCB design. It's amusing to see that ATI's 9500 and 9700 cards have practically identical PCB design and absolutely identical GPUs of the same production line. While the 128-bit bus is organized at the expense of reduced memory chips, the disconnection of 4 pipelines inside the chip is evidently organized logically. By now there are ways to enable all the 8 pipelines, although it's not yet possible to get one-one results, but we'll take about it in what follows. Outwardly, the card is absolutely identical to ATI 9700Pro, anyway there is a difference although completely invisible to the eye. This becomes vivid upon a bit closer look at both cards. Changes in the 9500 card are seen in the output modules as well as in some added modules close to the AGP connector.
 The connector for additional power merits a special consideration. ATI engineers decided the card wouldn't do without additional power, so a connector similar to that of the FDD was positioned on the farthest corner of the card. As I mentioned earlier, the card comes bundled with a splitter cable for power connectors, so there shouldn't be any problems with plugging it in. As was already mentioned, there is a standard R300 chip onboard manufactured on the 36th week of the year 2002, which is about early September.
The 64 MB memory chips made by Hyundai-Hynix are installed on both sides of the PCB and have the BGA form factor. As I already said, the quantity of chips has been reduced to 4, with their standard remained intact, which resulted in the drop of bit-rate from 256 to 128 bit. Judging by the marking HY5DU283222 F-36, the memory features a 3.6 ns access time.
DVI, TV-Out, D-Sub
As you can see, there are three connectors on the header of the video card. One DVI, one S-Video for plugging in a TV-set, and one D-Sub 15. Of priority is the D-Sub 15 connector, with the DVI and S-Video sharing the second RAMDAC of the chip. That is, simultaneous use of the TV-Out and a device connected to the DVI is impossible. The quality of TV-Out is middling since with the default settings the screen is crispy, and with the increased contrast many parts of bright half-tints turn bleached. The splitter cable for connecting the TV is organized in an awkward way. It's just the cable, not the adapter, which is too short and no extension cords are supplied in the bundle. It's been the first time I had to carry a VCR with a TV set to the computer in order to be able to test the output while testing the video card. If we plug only a TV set to the video card with all the monitors unplugged, then the loading and the text mode will be run in the NTSC standard, which is rather poor for our region and there are no ways currently to change the situation.
Cooling system
The radiator on board the Gigabyte card differs from the Reference in only the design and color, while its dimensions and cooling quality seem to be the same as before. Like in the whole like of R300-based video cards, the memory has no cooling of its own, but nothing prevents you to organize it yourself. The only remark as to the installation of third-party devices for memory cooling is the presence of electric cells amid the chips, so coupled radiators won't do - only individual cooling of each separate chip matters. But on the whole, if you don't intend to overclock, memory cooling is not going to be much of a destabilizing factor, unlike the chip cooling. The thermopaste between the radiator and the chip leaves much to be desired. It seems like a hybrid of double-sided scotch tape and paper is becoming trendy among video card manufacturers, but this fashion came up not because of the efficiency of this cooling method but due to its cost savings. So we recommend replacing it with a more decent option like KPT-8 or the like thermopaste. It's also worth reminding that some R300 chips have a manufacturing flaw in the skirting standing above the main crystal. We wrote about this issue in our previous review devoted to 9700Pro, so we're not going to dwell on that.
Some unpleasant remarks.
It is mandatory to note that the bug with crispy screen seems to be widespread and is really annoying for the user. I noticed that problem still on the Sapphire 9700Pro, but that time I thought it was an issue of the particular video card specimen, - moreover, I sent that card out for guaranteed replacement. On this Gigabyte's video card the bug has been reproduced, and what is more, I received many letters from users who suffer from similar problems. There were revealed several versions of this problem. In one of the versions, the stripes are always visible regardless of which outlet the output device (TV, monitor) is connected to or which drivers are installed. In the other version, the stripes are seen only when a monitor is plugged to the D-Sub connector, - all the remaining outputs produced normal image. In the third version, version two was eliminated through replacing Catalyst 3.0 drivers with Catalyst 2.5 drivers. My video card specimen had this version two problem, and replacement of drivers didn't help. I also revealed some dependence on the make of motherboards. With Intel-850EMV P4(i850Å), the problem was highly visible, the same with Gigabyte 7VAX (KT400), but with Asus A7V8X (KT400) the stripes were not seen at all. There was no dependence on the power supply and the AGP settings, so this issue is still open.
Another small problem was found out thereafter. Not all yoghurts are equally good to your health regardless of what TV commercials say - that's how I formulated the problem as soon as it came to my head. The thing is that not all monitors are recognized by the DVI output. If you wish to connect the master monitor to the DVI-out via an adapter, to get rid of the mentioned waves on the screen, your monitor can cancel displaying the text mode, i.e. the loading of the operating system with all the BIOS settings. Of course, as soon as the loading of the video driver is complete the image will resume, but before that the monitor won't switch on. This bug definitely depends on the monitor. Two absolutely identical Intergraph 21" monitors having different connections (one made via the D-Sub, the other via the BNC) showed contrary results - one worked, the other wouldn't. An old 14" monitor also wouldn't run. This is all I have been able to try by now. That parameter does not depend on the DVI -> D-Sub adapter, so it may easily turn out that even a monitor having only a DVI-connection will refuse to run correctly on this output. By the way, I tested operation of the monitors via adapters with a GeForce4 used. All the monitors without exception do run correctly.
It seems like ATI's Catalyst dubbed by folks as "cataclysm" is anyway not free of the bugs and blunders despite ATI's insistent assurance of the contrary. I wonder how long it will take the user to learn how to switch between the 60Hz and 85 Hz or higher of screen refresh rate under Windows XP. As for me, it took about ten minutes before it finally came upon me that it should have been changed in THREE places, whereas the monitor does switch but in fact the former 60 Hz stays. The first two places are the tabs "Adapter" and "Monitor" in Windows XP, with the third being the "Monitor" tab in the ATI control panel. This looks like a blunder in the drivers... but bugs merit a special consideration. I am now bringing in only those which I remember better, but I am sure they were much more than that. The most annoying bug was related to the RC0 drivers update management under DirectX 9. Do you really like the look-and-feel of this control panel?
 In the end, whatever I did I was unable to change the screen refresh rate in a monitor plugged to the D-Sub ... there was simply no third place for changes. Then, after disabling the V-Sync in the drivers control panel (seems like I didn't do anything else) the OpenGL driver happened to disable for an unknown reason so badly that I had to re-install the drivers. Another thing happened while I was playing in Morrowind when half the screen was covered with white noise of green dots and then the computer hung. The same bug also reproduced while playing Doom3 without the system hang. I can't remember the driver versions with which all that happened (at least, no less than Catalyst 2.5), but the very fact already suggests some ideas.
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