Great value for a great card.
Written: Jan 02 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Very good for the price, easy installation, works great.
Cons: Instructions are not simple for beginners.
The Bottom Line: I would recommend this card to someone that wants very recent technology for a great price. It is fairly simple to set up and use.
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| jjohnsen0's Full Review: ATI RADEON 7200, (64 MB) AGP Video Card |
I recently upgraded from a 3dfx Voodoo 3000 card to ATI's Radeon 7200. I have never had problems with my graphics cards in the past, I just wanted something a little faster, with some new technology.
The card comes with a small instruction booklet, the card and a cd with drivers and multimedia software. I have a little experience with computers so the instructions were pretty easy but some of it might be hard to understand for a beginner. It installed very quickly in my computer with no problems. Installing the software went smoothly considering it is a major piece of hardware. It had to restart the computer a few times, but finished within 5-10 minutes.
The one negative about the software was the multimedia software that comes witht the card. Unless you need a DVD player on I would recommend leaving it off. It changed some settings on my computer so that it was the default media player which I didn't want. It was easy enough to change but still a hassle.
The card supports DirectX and OpenGL. So far I haven't found any games or applications that have trouble with it including Excel, Word, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Civilization III.
This card uses the Radeon chipset which a lot of new technologies that I don't understand and am not sure I need. You can find out more about it here. http://www.ati.com/na/pages/products/pc/radeon_7200/index.html (copy and paste into your browser). It has 64 mb of ram which makes a huge difference in games. Everything I was playing before runs so smooth and fast, I can really tell a difference.
This card was the best one I could find for the price. I bought it at Circuit City for $99.00 but I've seen it online for $85.00. I haven't had any real problems with it. The one thing that worries me a little is I have heard ATI does not put out new drivers very often, but I reeally cannot say because the drivers I have work great and I haven't needed anything new.
I ran 3dmark on my computer before and after installing this card. 3dmark runs different tests on your computer to see how well it will run games at different levels of resolution. It basically tells you if your computer can run the newest games well. My 3dmark before this card was 987 and after the card 1798. Almost double the speed for running games is definetely worth $99.00 to me.
I am running Windows XP with a Pentium III 500 and 320 mb ram.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 99.00
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Epinions.com ID:
jjohnsen0
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Member: J
Location: Utah
Reviews written: 76
Trusted by: 2 members
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