ATI's Mobility Radeon 9700 - What's in a name?

The Test

This time around, we weren't able to arrange an ATI and NVIDIA head-to-head because of the timeline of the two products. Secondly, we would be highly sensitive to pitting the NV36M/NV36M Ultra against M11, unless we found a notebook that implements both in a modular graphics format.

Considering many of the games that we use are at least partially CPU bound, there would be no other way to render a judgment without leaving a shred of questionability. The other option for this would be to use a reference mobile card in a desktop system. This is basically a mobile GPU slapped on an AGP card for QA testing purposes, which would be duplicating the scenario for testing desktop cards where the GPU itself can be isolated for testing. This is the only way that we could compare the Mobility Radeon 9700 against the Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro to show if there is a performance increase.

As we have noted in the past, the problem with using reference cards have been two-fold: first, we have almost no idea what to run the clocks of the reference card at; and the second, the reference cards are, in many cases, pre-fabricated prototypes. Our benchmarks setup, therefore, is designed to be reflective of one of the upcoming Mobility Radeon 9700 based desktop replacement notebooks by using a desktop platform with reference cards (M10 and M11). We ran the Mobility Radeon 9700 at clock speeds that are identical to the unannounced design win, which will be introduced into the market within a week and a half.

Windows XP Professional Desktop Test System
CPU(s)	2.8GHz Pentium 4 (Prescott)
Motherboard(s)	Asus P4P800-VM
Memory	1GB DDR400
Hard Drive	80GB Seagate 8MB 7200RPM (SATA)
Video Card(s)	ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB 128-bit DDR ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 128MB 128-bit DDR
Ethernet	Onboard Ethernet Adapter
Operating System	Windows XP Professional SP1
Video Drivers	ATI Catalyst 4.1 build

For those curious readers, we ran several benchmarks on this unannounced notebook to verify its performance in comparison with our desktop configuration and Mobility Radeon 9700 reference card. There was no notable margin of difference between the two. Due to the NDAs, we can't say the exact clocks that we ran the Mobility Radeon 9700, but they are of high-end spectrum at which ATI is mandating the GPU to be run. As for the M10, we ran it at the Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro requirements, which made it slightly slower in the memory clock department compared to our Mobility Radeon 9600 and GeForce FX Go5650 head to head.