Good card for the money-not a speed demon
Written: Jan 23 '01 (Updated Jan 23 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Tested technology, good price for features and performance
Cons: ATI slow on new driver release, old technology, VIA incompatibilites
The Bottom Line: Good card for the family system.
Not a gamer's card, good 2d performance for business apps. reasonable performance for the occasional game.
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| suemccartin's Full Review: ATI Rage Fury Pro |
The last time I upgraded my system I wanted to go to DVD, I looked around at drives and accelerator cards such as the Hollywood but I decided I didn't want to mess with separate cards and all the hassles of separate drivers, cables, irq battles etc. So I started looking for an all-in-one video card that offered decent graphics, hardware acceleration for the dvd, and TV output. At the time I bought this card, GeForce was new and still way out of my budget. The Rage Fury pro is basically equivalent to the TNT2 graphics chip (Overclocked Rage 128 chip) which was a vast improvement over my old tnt1 based card.
For $150.00 (the card is now way cheaper than what I paid when it first came out) I got a decent AGP graphics card, basic video capture, dvd hardware acceleration, TV output (S-Video and RCA plugs on the card itself-no adapters) and video input ports (VIVO models only). I considered all of this quite a value.
Overall I would say I've been happy with the card. ATI as a company is slow to respond to technical support requests in my experience and takes months to release driver updates-but with rare exceptions many computer component companies have the same problems these days. Fortunately for them and us however, there is a cadre of loyal fans at rageunderground.com who always seem to have access to reference drivers, beta drivers and drivers written by other agencies that work fine with this video card, they also have a tech support newsgroup that I've found very helpful.
This card was respectable for its time, it's certainly no GeForce but it works fine for what I bought it for. Anyone that wants to do the occasional video capture, play DVD's either on their computer screen or through their television(both 640X480 and 800X600 higher resolution mode are available for tv output) and maybe play the occasional video game (I've played Diablo II, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and Might & Magic VIII on it and it is quite able to handle the load with acceptable 16bit graphics)will be happy with this card.
The only really annoying detail that bothered me when I purchased the card was that the front of the box trumpets Agp 4x compatibility--don't be fooled, this is a agp 2x card.
The connector it uses will fit in a newer agp 4x slot but it is not a 4x card, I have heard rumours that some of the later production runs of the card are capable of agp 4x mode but I don't know if that is true. This is not a gamer's card, but it also doesn't carry the price tag of a gamer's card. The other problem I had with it involved power saver/sleep mode on my VIA KX133 chipset motherboard, the card drivers were apparently interfering with the motherboard going into sleep mode and it couldn't be used, after a year of complaints from Epox and others, ATI finally released a set of drivers that cured this problem.
This is a decent general purpose graphics card that uses old but tested video chip technology and has many features usually only found on more expensive cards. This card would be great for the family system where mom and dad want to do the bills and wordprocessing, netsurfing, and the occasional video capture for the grandparents in another state, while the kids want to play Unreal, Diablo, etc.
This is a decent card for a family system that doesn't need a graphics card that costs two months of groceries.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 150.00
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Epinions.com ID:
suemccartin
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 - Top 500 |
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Location: Florida, USA
Reviews written: 292
Trusted by: 36 members
About Me:
Been building computers for 10+ years. I work to support my computer habit.
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