Technically, the 9500 Atlantis Pro is the same as any other 9500 Pro card. It has the same default core and memory speeds as the reference 9500 Pro - 275 core/270 mem - and uses the same 128-bit memory bus as other 9500 Pros. It uses the same ATI reference design most other companies use as well. There's nothing wrong with following the reference design of course, but it would be refreshing to see more companies trying to tweak the layout for better performance or efficiency.

The 9500 Pro card layout has been altered significantly over the 9700 Pro however. The most notable of changes is the BGA ram which has been relocated along the top edge of the card. The external power connector has also been moved back along the edge toward the middle of the card. The only problem with this new layout is that the power connector now gets in the way of one of the chips if you want to add some ramsinks to the card. You can possibly mod the power connector by cutting away some of the plastic and bending the connector up and away from the ram chip, but that would likely void your warranty... then again, adding ramsinks probably would too. Also, and not so noticeable, is the fact that the 9500 Pro uses only a 6-layer PCB as opposed to the 9700 Pros 8-layer PCB. The result is a much easier (read: cheaper) to produce card. They were able to move to a 6-layer PCB because of the 9500 Pro's less complex 128bit memory bus. Below are two comparison photos of the Sapphire Radeon 9500 Atlantis Pro and an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro:

9500 Atlantis Pro Layout

Radeon 9700 Pro Layout

And here is a table containing technical specs of the 9500 Atlantis Pro, with comparisons to other graphics cards around the industry:

	Sapphire 9500 Atlantis Pro	Sapphire 9700 Atlantis Pro	nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200	nVidia GeForce4 Ti4600	Matrox Parhelia
Manufacturing Process	.15µ	.15µ	.15µ	.15µ	.15µ
Transistor Count (millions)	110	110	63	63	80
Core Speed	275MHz	325MHz	250MHz	300MHz	220MHz
Memory Speed	270MHz DDR	310MHz DDR	257MHz DDR	325MHz DDR	275MHz DDR
Memory Interface	128bit	256bit	128bit	128bit	256bit
Max Memory	256MB	256MB	128MB	128MB	256MB
Rendering Pipelines	8	8	4	4	4
TMUs per Pipe	1	1	2	2	4
Peak Bandwidth	8.6 GB/s	19.8 GB/s	8.2 GB/s	10.4 GB/s	17.6 GB/s
Pixel Fillrate (million pixels/sec)	2,200	2,600	1,000	1,200	880
Texel Fillrate (million texels/sec)	2,200	2,600	2,000	2,400	3,520
Pixel-Shader version	2.0	2.0	1.3	1.3	1.3
Vertex-Shaders (version)	4 (2.0)	4 (2.0)	2 (1.1)	2 (1.1)	4 (2.0)