It was the 9500 that could be modded into a 9700. Early versions could be softmodded, this was disabled in later revisions which could only be modded by soldering the additional rendering pipes back on. No idea why I remember this useless piece of information.

Also on a completely different note, the 9700 Pro which was the flagship card of that generation, cost about $300. Times have changed.

$399 was the price on launch in 2002, which is around $550 adjusted for inflation, current flagship consumer GPU from Radeon is the Vega 64 priced at $599 RRP. Times haven't changed as much as you might think

AMD's flagship is the $700 Vega 64 LC. NVIDIA's flagship 1080 Ti is $700 and their soon-to-launch 2080 Ti is $1000 or $1200 for the Founders Edition.

Thanks! I wasn't in the market for one at the time (I don't think I had a job yet) but remember the furore. The idea that someone would sell hardware that deliberately performed below its potential was shocking to a lot of people. I guess it still is now, for instance the Tesla "60kWh" cars which actually had 70kWh packs and had extra range enabled with an OTA update ahead of a hurricane.