Fast, Stable and Affordable Gaming Card
Written: Dec 13 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Inexpensive, FAST, lots of memory, stable, AGP 8x.
Cons: ATI's unified drivers leave a little to want still as far as little bugs.
The Bottom Line: On a budget but still want to play the awesome games available today? Then get this card. It outperforms ANYTHING in it's price range.
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| orion522's Full Review: ATI RADEON 9600 Pro (128MB AGP) Graphics Card |
ATI has always been known for its stable graphics cards. In the past few years, NVidia has always been neck-and-neck with ATI as far as quality, speed, and price comparisons with their GeForce chip series. I think ATI has started to pull ahead of the pack with their newer renditions of the Radeon series.
Connections
The Radeon 9600 Pro 128 come with three connections that may be used simultaneously: DVI, Analog, and S-Video. There are no inputs for capturing video, but that isn't what this card was designed for.
The DVI output is especially nice for LCD Flat Panel monitors. Having each pixel directly mapped from the video card makes for a superb picture quality unmatched by anything else.
The Analog port is your standard VGA monitor connection. Nothing special here.
S-Video out makes a great simultaneous TV connection so you can watch a DVD playing on one screen and still have your homework open on the other.
Memory and Cooling
With 128MB of DDR memory running on a 128-bit interface, no video game for the next couple of years will complain that you need more video RAM. What makes it even better is that the Radeon 9600 Pro runs on a 600 MHz memory clock which means an even bigger boost to rendering complex graphics.
So far on all the 9600 series cards except for the SE, ATI supplies a heat sink with cooling fan to ensure your card's GPU or memory chips never overheat.
Raw Speed
With 4 rendering pipelines onboard, this card never wants for data. The engine of this card runs at a screaming 400 MHz (or if you go with the XT model, 600 MHz) which gives it a blindingly fast 1.6 Gpixels/sec. Gpixels stands for gigapixels, which means that this card fills 1.6 billion pixels each second (that's really really fast). This compares to the GeForce 5200 FX Ultra card, but actually outperforms it in pixel fill rate and memory bandwidth.
Combine all of the above with the ability to run this at AGP 8x and now your gaming system can scream data to this card as fast as your CPU and throw it out. For systems that don't support AGP 8x, this card is also backwards compatible with AGP 4x systems (I haven't tried it on any system with an AGP slot slower than 4x so I can't comment on that).
Real World Performance
On my system, Pentium 4 2.4 GHz, 533 MHz frontside bus, 1.0GB DDR 2700 RAM, there isn't much that I can't do gaming wise. Halo plays flawlessly at 800x600, 32 bit color as well as Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic. Going into higher resolutions starts to choke up my system a bit when explosions and tons of dynamic screen effects start happening rapidly on screen.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
orion522
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Member: Larry
Location: California
Reviews written: 47
Trusted by: 6 members
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