Pros: Works well with Photoshop; DVI port; S-Video port
Cons: Confusing and complicated installation
The Bottom Line: The card works well but be prepared for a confusing and problematic installation. I got mine working right eventually. I rate it 3.5 stars.
pvreditor's Full Review: ATI RADEON 9000 PRO, (64 MB) AGP Video Card
I was really looking forward to the installation of more memory in my main computer. I opened the case, located the slot, popped the memory in and turned my Windows 98 SE computer on.
Nothing, nothing, nothing. There was a beep, no display and, after a minute or so, the computer turned itself off. I frantically juggled my three memory chips, trying every possible combination but could not get the slightest display — not a flicker.
To make a long story short, after quite a bit of troubleshooting, I discovered that my display card had taken the very moment of my memory chip installation to die. It was time for a new display card.
I settled on the ATI Radeon 9000 Pro, which I got for $100. The card has the following features:
64 MB DDR SGRAM
AGP 2X and 4X support
Outputs: VGA, DVI and S-Video
Neither the manual nor the box give any information about the processor used by the ATI Radeon 9000 Pro, except to say “Accelerated by ATI’s Radeon 9000 Pro visual processor.” Like, duh! No speed or processing power are mentioned anywhere. If I had realized this, I probably wouldn’t have bought it.
Included with the card is a DVI-to-VGA adapter, so that I can apparently use the DVI port as another VGA port. Also included is an S-Video-to-composite video adapter, so that I can plug the card into any standard NTSC video monitor. (NTSC is the television standard used in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Japan, Korea and a few other countries.)
This is a medium-sized AGP card that is thin enough that it doesn’t interfere with any other card. It fit smoothly into my AGP slot and screwed down with no problem.
Driver installation for this card took several steps and the process was not clear in the manual. Keep in mind that I have a Windows 98 SE computer and results will probably be different with Windows 2000, XP and ME. In fact, it took me a couple of days and some head scratching to get everything apparently working properly. I did not try calling ATI for help — I eventually figured it all out myself.
I first loaded the drivers for the Radeon 9000 Pro from the included CD-ROM, misunderstanding what the manual was telling me. I then installed the card and reinstalled the drivers upon boot-up, as requested by Windows. After a couple of error messages, I got an image and set it to my desired resolution, 1280 x 1024.
I decided to re-load the board’s drivers, using the driver-loading menu on the CD-ROM. This went well and produced the expected menus to adjust all of the display system’s parameters. I also loaded a couple of the demos that come with the CD-ROM, including animated nature and fantasy scenes, and also a fairly believable “virtual person” called Rachel. (Don’t get too excited… it just shows her pretty — and almost lifelike — face.) The detail and animation in these demos are exquisite and a loop of the nature demo would make for some nice animated art.
All my usual Windows stuff worked well, too… with one exception, which I will get to in a moment. I do not do any gaming and I realize that the ATI Radeon 9000 Pro is targeted at gamers. However, I do a lot of high-end picture processing with Adobe Photoshop, and this card is definitely better than my old card with Photoshop. (My old card was a 32 MB card from Diamond, a company that no longer makes graphics cards.) With the Radeon 9000 Pro, I can open 10 four-megapixel pictures at once and get good response when I work with any one of the pictures. The old card bogged down considerably with five open images.
Other typical uses for me include Word, Excel, Sound Forge and Internet Explorer, and these all work fine with the Radeon 9000 Pro.
The one thing that was worse with the new card was DVD playback, which was noticeably jerky. I tried several DVDs and still got jerky playbacks, even with the DVD playback software that comes with the Radeon 9000 Pro. After sleeping on it for a night, I hit the manual again and saw a recommendation that I load the most recent drivers for my motherboard chipset, as this can affect AGP performance. Since my motherboard uses the VIA chipset, I went to the VIA Web site, downloaded the new drivers and installed them on my computer. DVD playback is MUCH improved and is nearly perfect now… and I can use the old DVD player software that I was already familiar with.
Finally, I checked the Windows Control Panel “System" icon to see what information it had on my new display card. Sure enough, there were two listings for the ATI Radeon 9000 Pro — a main listing and a listing for a “secondary” version — and the secondary version showed an error indicating it was not running. Following the troubleshooting tips suggested by Windows, I forced the secondary driver to run and re-booted my computer. It worked!
I have now re-booted my computer several times and all is well with the card. There are no more errors on the Control Panel, all programs work well and DVDs playback smoothly. I think the card is finally installed properly.
Without being a gamer, I can’t give my opinion on that aspect of this card. However, I’m very impressed with the Radeon 9000 Pro’s Photoshop performance and the demos that came with the card look fantastic. The digital photography images are sharp as a tack… then again, they were with my old card, too.
I have also tried the video output from the card, using an old video monitor that I have. It produces a signal that is about as fuzzy as I expected… I can read the words that I’m typing for this review (which I’m writing in Word with a 12-point font) but normal Windows stuff is fuzzy on the video monitor.
The box lists all sorts of arcane features for this card, including things like:
Four parallel rendering pipelines
Smartshader technology
DirectX 8.1 and OpenGL 1.3 support
Smoothvision technology
Hyper Z technology
Charisma Engine II
Video Immersion II
Fullstream Technology
I do not know what most of these things are and I have no idea why I should care. I bought the card because it had at least 64 MB of RAM and because it had both a DVI output and a video output. Since I might get an LCD monitor someday, and since LCD monitors work best with a DVI output, I spent a few extra bucks to get the DVI output now. Unfortunately, I don’t have an LCD monitor to try it out with… yet.
The ATI Radeon 9000 Pro card produces crisp images and does much better with big Photoshop files than my old card. But beware of a complex and confusing installation procedure. If you are buying this card for a new computer, then the computer manufacturer will do all the loading and debugging. If you are buying it to upgrade your current display card, be prepared for some confusion, debugging and head scratching.
I give the card five stars for image quality, speed and features, but only two stars for installation set-up. If I weren’t pretty knowledgeable about computers, I would have had a real problem with this card. And yes, my new memory works, too.
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