Radeon 9700 sighted, reviewed, hyped to the eyeballs

SOME OF YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED that ATI launched its much salivated over R300 graphics chips last night at a booze-up in London. INQHacks were there to bring the story and pix early this morning, which you'll find here and here.

Some sites picked up on our stories, including 3DChipset. There, Solomon says, "we rarely post anything to The InQueerer (sic) but they seem to be the only one so far with London coverage."

"Once a legit site gets more info we will switch to them".[our italics].

We're not sure what we've done to have young Solomon queer us up like this and far be it from us to question his own legitmacy. Thanks for the link, Solly.

While we're on the subject, SlCentral posted a bunch of of our wise words on their site here. Not only that, but they spammed us a couple of times to brag about how they'd secured the fix for AMD platforms running DirectX 8, which was what the story they nicked off us was about.

Anyhow, eternal student, and, we assume, faithful reader of the INQUEERER, Paul, pointed out the apparent plagiarism, prompting Honest Dave, the writer, to fess up to "missing out the quotes." We'll let you off Dave. This time.

So, back to the plot and here's the hardware scoop of the day, it's Anand's review of the aforementioned R300 in the form of an ATI 9700 board.

Tech Report posts a story from the event last night with some details of the hardware here. We're not sure, however, if the boys from 3DChipset reckon this is a "legit" site or not. Still, who cares?

ATI also held an event in San Francisco to launch the Radeon 9000 and Radeon 9000 Pro, and here's a report from there posted on ViaHardware.

Gearing up towards the launch, a couple of sites had the idea of revisiting ATi's previous top chip, the Radeon 8500. 3D Velocity took a look at how the drivers for boards sporting this chip developed to improve performance here. While Hardwareluxx had a fiddle with Gigabyte's 128 MB Maya Radeon 8500 Deluxe. That's here.

Right that's quite enough Radeons.

Here's a roundup of Pentium 4 Chipsets Supporting 533MHz Bus by X-bit labs.

Tweakers asylum looks at a Inno3D Tornado GeForce4 Ti4200 (64 MB) card over here.

And the Phluxers put a couple of cases up against each other to see which they prefer. Their Scorpio vs AVGS Cyber Fusion piece is here.

And finally news reaches us that JC is back. To find out where he's been and what he's up to now click here. µ