2. What The "NEW" MR 9700 Offers

The new MR 9700 differs from its predecessor, the year-old Mobility Radeon 9600, in only three ways:

Thanks to founder partner TSMC's new and improved 130-nm process and low-k dielectrics production technology, ATi can now offers faster processors that consume a lot less power. The benefits of this process, especially for mobile chips, are obvious. Lower power draw means less energy is used, thereby extending battery life. On the other hand, a higher core clockspeed helps narrow the performance gap between desktop and mobile PCs. However, one thing should be clear: Even in the future, notebooks will never be able to benefit from both advantages at the same time. The user can either choose higher performance at the cost of greater power requirements or decide to go with an extended battery rundown time, which will conversely throttle performance. TSMC has not published much information on the low-k-process. The few facts that are available can be found on page two of a previous article A New Notebook Hosts the Athlon64's Mobile Coming Out Party. While the previous mobile top model, the Mobility Radeon 9600 PRO, reached clockspeeds of 350MHz, the new Mobility Radeon 9700 will offer speeds up to 450MHz. The chip in our review sample was clocked at a full 445MHz, as our screenshots show.

Record: The MR 9700 ran stable at a core speed of 445MHz

Whether or not chips found in retail notebooks will also run at such high speeds remains to be seen. Obviously, we can't guarantee this, as it is entirely possible that we were sent an especially potent sample chip.

Every gamer has experienced this dreaded moment. One moment you're fragging the daylights out of your opponents, the next moment your screen freezes. More often than not, the problem is caused by the graphics driver and can only be remedied by rebooting the system. A new driver feature called "VPU Recover" promises to make rebooting after driver freezes obsolete. When the graphics driver crashes, it is automatically restarted, making the reboot unnecessary - at least in theory.

VPU Recover: This is the VPU Recover Tab in the Catalyst driver v3.8 for desktop cards.

This is a feature the MR9700 also supports. Unfortunately, the drivers that came with our review system did not yet offer the tab that would have let us activate VPU Recover.