decent for low budget older systems

Relevent about the system this card was used on.
intel 1.8Ghz P4
intel 845GRG motherboard
768mb pc2100 ram

This card was bought to replace my integrated intel extreme video card.

The card does ok. It would work for someone with a budget and lacking PCI express or AGP slots to upgrade to. The frame rates are up to playable levels on games that before I could not play even at the lowest settings. Still though it is behind what a modern AGP or PCI-express card could give. Part of this is the 64bit bus which is behind many new cards having a 128 bit bus, the limited memory available at 128 mb and and that it is still using the old pci bus which has limited bandwidth.

With those that like to overclock this version of the 9250 doesn't seem the best from my experience. The card has just a single thought large heatsink with no fans to help cool it off. The fan has then been epoxied to the video card which prevents you from upgrading it to a better cooling unit. With my overclocking I have brought it from 240/200 GPU/MEM clock to 300/225 but that only offered a very negligable increase in performance. I have since added a extra fan that uses another PCI to provide cooling and that doesn't really change much. the card starts to show massive artifacts at much above those clock speeds even though the heat sink is staying cool. Once I get the clock into the 320 range it shows imediate artifacts even though there has been no where near enough time for anything to heat up. Above that the video card stumbles and acts as though it reboots at which point the clocks are back to the default of 240/200. If you must have a 9250 you would be better off buying one of the other makers of the card as some of them have been able to achieve quite a bit more in terms of overclock and still be stable. Some able to get near 350/230 without using the external cooler like I have done.

I am still happy though as it has allowed support for some newer games with LIVABLE framerates. Though if I had to do this again and had to stay PCI I would spend the extra money and buy something different. this is a budget card I understand but there is still better to be had while keeping the pci bus. The performance just isn't there and the overclocking can't overcome that as it is even very limited in this version of the ati 9250.

with image quality it does seem a little better then the stock card but not much. I still have yet to see what anti aliasing and trilinear filtering look like as when I attempt to activate them my frame rates drop through the floor and most games are not able to be played. I am able to use a little higher quality settings in the game itself but that generally brings the semi decent game into more of just livable, still better then before the upgrade where the game was not even close to being playable though.