ATI Radeon 32MB DDR: Out with the Old and In with the New
Written: Apr 16 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Outstanding Price to Performance Ratio
Beats GeForce 2 MX in 32Bit performance.
Extremely cheap.
Cons: No bundled software.
Slower than 64MB version.
The Bottom Line: The ATI Radeon 32 MB DDR is an excellent card. It packs performance and image quality into one extremely cheap package.
|
|
|
| hipo128's Full Review: ATI RADEON, (32 MB) AGP Video Card |
ATI is a company known for its All-In-Wonder chipset for DVD playback and video editing. Their attempts into the chipset market have not given NVIDIA a scare until now.
The ATI Radeon chipset is a new generation chipset with DirectX 8 support. This chipset in now giving NVIDIA a big scare. This card, especially in 32 bit mode beats out the NVIDIA budget card, the GeForce 2 MX.
The new features in the Radeon include:
HARDWARE T&L: Relieves processing strain on CPU
FSAA (Full Scene Anti Aliasing): Gets rid of the jagged edges on graphics (WARNING: Big performance drop, hopefully newer drivers will fix this)
HYPERZ: ATI's new technology that fixes the clogging of the memory bandwith (Something the plagues the GeForce line of cards)
Overclocking the card is also very easy. I purchased the OEM version, therefore my speed was clocked to 150/150Mhz. Without adding any cooling, i got to 180/180 without any artifacts. After replacing the stock heatsink and adding a bigger heatsing with an Athlon CPU fan and RAMheatsinks, i got up to 205/205 without any artifacts. Leave the memory and core speeds synchronous, it really performs better that way.
Let it be known that the Radeon's competitors all have their strengths and weaknesses. It depends on what you are looking for in a video card. Look for benchmarks on the internet to get a better idea of speed to quality ratios and etc.
Although the 32MB version of the Radeon is slightly slower than the 64MB version, it is still a great card. I chose the 32Mb Radeon and saved $100 over the 64MB version. Games such as Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament are spectacular. It's also helpful that ATI has finally started working on better driver support. The latest beta drivers have fixed the once infamous fog performance drop. One note, if you are using Windows 2000, the drivers do not perform as well as the drivers for Win9x. If you are looking for image quality without sacrificing speed, this is the card for you.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 77
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
hipo128
|
|
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2010 Shopping.com, Inc.