ATI Mobility Radeon 9700

Recently, we posted a review of the ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 GPU. The Mobility Radeon 9700 proved to be a very powerful mobile GPU in our tests, topping other comparable mobile GPUs.

Today, we are going to see if we can further extend that lead. But first, let's refresh our memory of the some of the top GPUs in the ATI Mobility family.

As you can see, the ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 officially runs at 450MHz core and 260MHz memory. Of course, in reality, the actual clock speeds are determined by the notebook manufacturers.

Our Testbed

Our testbed is the recently reviewed BenQ Joybook 7000 notebook which is powered by an Intel Pentium M 725 (1.6GHz) processor and of course, the Mobility Radeon 9700. Let's compare the specifications of the BenQ Joybook 7000's Mobility Radeon 9700 GPU with the official ATI specifications.

While the core clock speed was close to the maximum rated clock speed, the memory clock was really low at only 216MHz. Naturally, that reduced its performance by limiting the amount of memory bandwidth available to the GPU. The Mobility Radeon 9700 was basically memory-limited in the BenQ Joybook 7000.

It comes with 64MB of DDR SDRAM, which is pretty much standard fare these days. This allows for a moderate amount of texture storage although AGP texturing will definitely be needed with texture-intensive games. In addition, the Joybook 7000's motherboard only supported AGP4X transfers.

Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to see how far I can push the Mobility Radeon 9700. You never know, some overclocking may actually turn this fast mobile GPU into a real beast! Although nothing can be done about the AGP protocol support or the size of its memory buffer, the boost in clock speeds should speed things up quite a bit. Let's see how I fared!