SUMMARY: It is always good to have choice. Up until ATI released its Radeon 8500, many users wanting powerful computer systems were forced to look for nVidia based graphics solutions. Fortunately for us, ATI hit back hard with their Radeon 9xxx series of graphics cards which presented us with new choices and happily opened the market right up. Gigabyte were one company which went along with ATI and Cameron "Sov" Johnson takes us on a discovery of both of the latest Maya series graphics cards based on ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro and 9000 cores!
For quite some time now Gigabyte has been an avid supporter of the ATI brand of video cards. Gigabyte turned their backs on nVidia back in the GeForce3 days, simply because of the fact that they were too expensive to produce, and didn’t match their market strategy of the time.
This was what we thought it would be a suicide attempt by Gigabyte, with nVidia holding all the right cards at the time. ATI’s introduction of the 8500 GPU saw the much needed revamp of the ATI name. With the power of the 8500 GPU, at a much more affordable price than the GeForce3, and with just as much power, it seemed like a good thing for ATI, Gigabyte and all of ATI’s partners. Then the GeForce4 soon turned things back to nVidia’s favour and the ATI 8500 needed a boost - adding extra memory only softened the blows to ATI.
The Radeon 9xxx series was to bring ATI back from the depths and this it has. Gigabyte being the avid supporter of the ATI name has introduced two new video cards based on the Radeon 9xxx series - one for the budget conscious, and one for the extreme level. Today we are looking at both in the Maya ATI Radeon 9000 budget and the Maya II ATI Radeon 9700 Pro extreme machine.
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