Great card
Written: Apr 30 '01 (Updated Apr 30 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, stable, lots of features.
Cons: Can't get the DVD player to work
The Bottom Line: Fast, stable, and video capture in MPEG-2 format. It can also use your TV as the output monitor.
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| slimtae's Full Review: ATI Radeon 64MB DDR |
My current system used to have the Nvidia GeForce Plus video card. Recently, much to my chagrin and annoyment, it went bad on me. It caused my monitor to make dark bands run across the screen, and created an eye-straining haze on the entire screen which caused all the contrast to wash out. So I went hunting for a graphics card. I saw the ATI Radeon card with 64 MB of DDR memory, and as an impulse, bought it. I have no clue what DDR stands for, but I knew 64 MB was a lot of memory for a graphic card. My old card had 32 MB of memory.
After buying it, I did some research into the card and found out some people have been having trouble installing the card onto their systems. Talk about doing things backwards. Anyway, with trepidation and great anxiety (as I always do when I install anything onto a PC), I plugged in the card.....and holy canoli, it installed like a charm. At the same time, I removed the driver for my old card and configured my new card to my liking. This required a series of re-boots, which went OK for the most part. During one re-boot an ominous message appeared saying something about how it couldn't find some file to finish booting and that the system was halted. It stayed halted for several minutes...unable to boot up. I was gathering my paraphenalia for the hari-kari cerimony, when as a last ditch prayer, I hit the reset button....next thing I know, it booted fine...phew.
The card performs like a charm. Graphics on 3D games is flawless, it has good utility tools for configuring your desktop, and (if it suits you), it has a video out slot to transfer signal to your TV...I'm going to try playing Quake Arena on my big sreen TV soon....shhh...don't tell my wife. It also has video capture capabilities, and is capable of encoding in MPEG-2 format. I tried it, and it's much better that another video capture device I have (a USB Dazzle Video Creator).
Other feature of the card include the "Charisma Engine", Puxel Tapestry, 4-Matrix skinning, etc. What do these mean to me? I haven't the foggiest...but apparently, they do the job nicely.
I haven't mentioned yet what I like about the card the most. On my old Nvidia card, my monitor (and I think my whole system) almost always locked up when I kept my computer idle for a long time (a few hours). My monitor would be blank when I came back, and moving the mouse had no effect....it would stay blank. Even Ctrl-Alt-Del failed to re-boot the system, and my on/off button couldn't even turn off the system. The only way to get out of this was to unplug the computer, or hit the reset button. This was an annoying quirk that I learned to accept and come to terms with...like living with a family member everyone is emabarassed of. For an entire year I lived with this. When I installed the ATI Radeon card....I'll give you one guess what happened. No more lock-ups...my joy was overwhelming. Apparently, the ATI card was more compatible with my system than the card it was shipped with...are you listening Dell?
The only gripe I have with the card is that I can't get the DVD player to work. It has hardware DVD playback capabilities, but I can't run the provided DVD player application. I think it has something to do with the fact that I still a separate DVD decoder card in a PCI slot...the decoder card my old Nvidia was hooked up to. Still, my old DVD player application still works fine, so I can live with this. Does anyone know how to fix this?
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 199
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Epinions.com ID:
slimtae
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Reviews written: 95
Trusted by: 11 members
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