10 out of 10 people found this review helpful.
Fastest GPU available
Date of Review: Feb 21, 2004
The Bottom Line: One of the cheaper graphics solutions to get top performance and this card was well priced (#170), get it if you can.
I bought this card to replace my Radeon 9000 Pro 128MB, I only bought the 9000 last year however this was at the budget end of the market and I did not expect much for #60. Suffice to say the 900 Pro suffered greatly with later games and does not support DX9, frame rates were getting unplayable even on my XP2800 system.
The 9800 Pro installed without a hitch, the card was picked up by windows automatically and I simply inserted the manufacturers disk, these drivers were later updated to the most recent catalyst version. I did notice however that the card extends far onto the other side of my ATX motherboard, so much so that it partially blocks one of the catches for the Ram slots; this may be a problem if you are frequently changing your system configuration.
Games like Halo and Deus Ex 2 are now playable on even the highest settings. I have Dues Ex 2 running at 1200 x 1024 x 32bit @ 75hZ, and it runs smoothly, before it was just playable. This card seems to handle anything you throw at it, and the driver utilities are excellent, such as the TV support, and VPU recover. 2D performance is great, the picture quality is very high and now I can run windows at 1600 x 1200 at 75hZ which was unseen before.
Above all this is one of the fastest cards available, and at #170 from tekheads it is an amazing bargain, do not be fooled by the likes of Nvidia with worse performance and costing 2 1/2 times as much!
CompuVest
