Gigabyte's GV-9500 PRO is laid out in an identical fashion to the reference ATI design but with Gigabyte's own gold anodisied aluminum heatsink. The card looks identical to a Radeon 9700 PRO.

The only give-away at a quick glance is the position of the four-pin power adapter, which is now further back on the card. This adapter comes with 128MB of 3.6ns DDR memory on board and supports both Direct X9 and AGP 8X.

Based on ATI's Radeon 9700 PRO (R300) core, the 9500 family features the same feature set with subtle changes and lower core and memory speeds. Briefly, the 256-bit memory bus of the 9700 PRO is halved to 128-bit and, while the 9500 PRO retains the eight pixel pipelines of the 9700 PRO, the standard 9500 has only four.

Furthermore, the core speed for the 9500 is 250MHz with the memory running at 540MHz (270MHz DDR), while the 9500 PRO has a 275MHz core and a memory speed of 550MHz (275MHz DDR).

The standard back plate has VGA, DVI-I and S-Video outlets. Supplied with the card are a DVI-I to VGA converter, power cable, S-Video and Composite cables and an S-Video to Composite converter.

In addition to the driver CD you get a games bundle consisting of full versions of Serious Sam and Rune. There's also a copy of Cyberlink's PowerDVD XP for watching movies.