I can't get anywhere with ATI trying to support their 9700 Pro card. I've emailed them numerous times for help. They have given me numerous performance killing settings 4x try disable fast writes. This is where I drew the line when they asked me to disable hyperthreading WHAT!!! I spent all this money for that proc so I could have that function. I don't want to downgrade my system any further I want my 8x I want my fast writes and I want my HYPERTHREADING. I would like to call them but they don't have a toll free number?!?!? I found that businesses that do this are usually having an enormous amount of phone calls and customers demanding fixes for problems. Just look over the forums with this card trying to run it at 8x. The forums from numerous websites have many people dealing with this issue. So now I should buy a 9800 Pro Fix the F' in 9700 Pro.

Opps
I was not as impressed with the performance of the ATI 9800 Pro as much as I was by its stability. I have a motherboard with the E7205 chipset. The 9700pro would not function properly on my board. ATI blamed Intel they told me to disable everything even Hyperthreading (I have a 2.4gig processor which doesn't even support Hyperthreading) clearly they don't know what their talking about. fortunatly after 4 months I was still able to exchange my card through my dealer. Changing to the 9800 Pro might not fix everyone problems but it worked for me.
The card showed little improvment over the 9700 Pro when using 3D Mark 2001 only about 400 points but using the 3DMark 2003 benchmark it brought the score up from 4900something to 5500 something.
So that 1 thumscrew UP for the 9800Pro