Ati Radeon 9800 Pro 128 Views

Electronics

Crucial is one of the largest suppliers of memory online, but few recognize them for their other products. Recently they have begun expanding their line of products by moving into the flash memory products and now with an expanded video card line. Originally they only sold the ATI based Radeon 9700 Pro video cards, but in early December they have added the 9200SE, 9200, 9600 Pro, 9800 Pro 128MB and 256MB. For this review, I will be examining the Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB.

Technically, there is very little difference between the Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB and 256MB versions. The 128MB uses DDR while the 256MB uses a more expensive DDR2 memory. This is the main reason for the $100+ difference between the two cards. Performance should be similar between the two with the 256MB version having slightly better performance in future games due to the extra memory and slightly faster memory speeds.

ATI has recently offered a dynamic overclocking feature to their latest Radeon 9800XT based cards, but this is still unavailable to owners of other Radeon cards such as the Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro. To properly test the overclocking ability of the card, I used the RadClocker utility. This is an application that adds a tab to the advanced video properties for adjusting the core and memory clock speeds. Using 3Mhz increments, I gradually increased the clock speeds until instability in the picture or system was produced in an Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark loop. It was then backed off slightly until consecutive stable runs without artifacts were produced.

So does the Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB make a good graphics card for the PC enthusiast? The answer based on the all the benchmarks is a definitive yes. The card is able to produce an outstanding level of performance that allows higher quality features such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filters to be used. Performance levels are between 50% to 100% greater than the 9600 Pro that sells for half the amount. Based on these facts alone, those looking for great graphics quality and performance can't go wrong.