Since the launch of the original radeon the throne of performance king has been very close between ATi and nVidia, continually battling for pride of place in the performance users desktop. Once again we find ourselves in this situation but this time the question on everyones mind is which card will be the card to buy at christmas?

Today, I have an ATi Radeon 9700 Pro and an nVidia ti4600 reference card.

So lets start by comparing the physical features.

Colour aside, to look at - they are in fact very similar. I assume as usual, manufacturers such as Gainward will produce a red version of the ti4600.

The first thing that struck me as different from their predecessors is the exclusion of RAM sinks. This is due to moving over to the tinyBGA format. These give off a lot less heat that the old variety and of course let us achieve a faster speed. One of the other reasons for excluding ramsinks is in the design of the heatsinks. In theory they both move air across the RAM, in nVidia's case more so due to the shrouding over the sink. The problem with this design is assumes that there is adequate case cooling for the rear ram chips - this is not always the case.

You may also notice the size difference between these cards. The ti4600 is a good 2" larger in length which can cause problems in certain cases (no pun intended).

The Radeon has an external power supply much like the Voodoo 5x series had. This should help with the stability of the card and stop problems with badly designed motherboards.

And of course both cards have the usual Analog/DVI and now pretty standard TV-Out.

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