Budget card KING!
Written: May 26 '03 (Updated May 30 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent DVD playback, Excellent game performance for a $200 card!
Cons: 9600Pro may be the better buy especially if you plan to overclock
The Bottom Line: Well above average performance in the sub-$200 price range make this card a winner in my book. 256Mb GeForceFX5600 is the only other like-performance, like-priced competition
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| psykosis_fc's Full Review: ATI RADEON 9500 PRO, (128 MB) AGP Video Card |
***By Request****
Current system specs;
AMD AthlonXP1600@1700Mhz (170FSBx10)
Abit KX7-333@170FSB
OCZ Cas2 512Mb DDR@2-2-2-5-1
Radeon9500Pro@360core/325mem
SBLive!5.1MP3
WD Caviar 7200rpm/2Mb 30GB UATA133
Seagate Cheetah 7200rpm/4Mb 60GB UATA133
Intel ProShare 100/1000 Nic
Swiftech MCX462+ HS with Delta80mmx38mm@7v
Zalman ZM80A-HP VGA heatsink with 60mm 12cfm fan
Pioneer 16x DVDRom
TDK VeloCD 24/12/56x
current 3dMark2001SE score 13,512
****end update****
I got this card in January, the first week it was released and while I suspect that the initial batch may be a little bit better than those that followed, all of the 9500 line of card are showing *FAR* above average performance in the sub-$200 range than everything but the newer 9600 line.
I wasn't really planning on getting this card as I was fortunate enough to have been given a Radeon8500 128Mb, but honestly I'm glad I did.
My system was getting rather dated composing of an overclocked XP1700 , AbitKT7Raid and an ElsaGladiacGTS32Mb. 3dMark2001SE score was a little over 4000 at default settings, which sounds kinda low but is actually pretty good considering the 2nd gen nVidia card and the KT7. I got a KX7333 motherboard that allowed me to overclock the FSB from 112Mhz (KT7) to a whopping 170Mhz thanks to the 5/1 divider on the KX7. The new motherboard, the gifted R8500 and alot of tweaking brought me up to about 8000 3dMarks--a healthy improvement.
Being back on a non nVidia card also reminded me of how shockingly bad the visual quality is in the default nVidia D3D and OpenGL settings. Don't get me wrong--there's nothing wrong with nVidia based cards' visual quality, you just have to spend alot of times with specialized applets like nvHardPage and such to get rid of the poorly implemented DXTexture compression among other things. After living with the GeForceGTS card for better than 3 years, I'd grown accustomed to getting the newest Detonator drivers and tweaking settings every two weeks to restore some of the visual quality on the card. (side note; I've played with several GF3 and 4 cards and the same anomolies were present in all the GF cards that I've tested leading me to believe that those problems are driver based and not necessarily hardware based)
Packaging
It seems like every video card made today has some kind of 'catch' to it's packaging, either flashy box graphics or some kind of wild name or both. Witness such titles as the "Evil Commmando" or "Golden Sample" to bask in the glory that is the marketing world. The 9500Pro was no different sporting a screen capture of one of ATI's demo programs; a three-headed pitbull looking thing done up in chrome... :P Cheese aside, inside the box was where the good stuff is. You get the card itself, a driver disk, an SVideo cable. SVideo to composite dongle, a DVI to SVGA dongle and a molex power-splitter for the aux power connection. All in all, averything was securely packaged and the inclusion of both the DVI to VGA dongle and the SVideo cable were a surprising/nice inclusion.
The Card
There are a couple of things noteable about the card layout. Starting from the connections in the back, you get three ways to connect the card to a display device; SVGA, SVideo and DVI. All three can be used at once to drive multiple displays via ATI's Hydravision.
Moving to the PCB, you'll notice that the BGA ram chips are arrainged accross the top of the card--this is signifigant if you plan on doing some super-cooling shenanegans and/or adding custom ramsinks to aid overclocking. The 9700/9800 and the new 9600 all have the ram arrainged in an "L" shape with 4 along the top and 4 along the front edge instead of all 8 accross the top as on the 9500. This shouldn't really be a decision basing factor, only interesting to point out if you are going to do something like liquid cool the ram (I am).
The auxiliray power connector is a 4pin floppy drive type--I prefer this since it's smaller and I don't run floppy drives in my PC's anymore and always have at least one of these connectors free.
The heatsink is fairly insubstantial and standard ATI fare with a tiny 3cfm swizzle stick of a fan. Unlike cards from other companies, the 9500 doesn't really need any additional cooling out of the box and does an adequate job of keeping heat in check.
Software
Along with device drivers and utilities like Hydravision, ATI has included a proprietary multimedia/DVD player application that frankly sucks. Picture quality of DVD's was bad, the interface worse and to top things off, it wasn't that stable. Thankfully, both WinDVD and PowerDVD both absolutely shine with this product, providing smooth hardware excelleration and *VERY*, very god picture quality and playback. NTSC resampling and TV Output was among the best I've seen, rivaling even high-dollar standalone DVD players.
Apparently, ATI has had problems in the past with their device drivers. With nVidia moving to a unified driver architecture and a single download for all their products, the rest of the industry has scrambled to follow suit. ATI had some teething problems with this in the past, but thankfully, the new unified Catalyst drivers install/uninstall/upgrade flawlessly. If you have been shying away from ATI or staying on the nVidia side of the fence because of driver horror stories that you've read, rest assured that it's now not a problem at all. Drivers work the way they are supposed to and provide very easy and painless installation and upgrade.
Performance
What can I say; this is one seriously fast card for what it is! Performance went from 4,227 with the Elsahttp://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=3373810
to http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=573103811,757 with the R9500. Now, mind you that dramatic improvement wasn't due to the card alone, but was also due to a motherboard upgrade, but honestly it was the single most signifigant upgrade that I've seen in a while. After a bit of tweaking in the drivers (Using the OmegaCatalyst drivers and the R9700 SoftMod), some improved GPU cooling from Zalman and a fair bit of overclocking, I arrived at 13,168 http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=5638738wit the 9500 overclocked to 325core and 325mem. Not bad! From about 6,000 with the motherboard upgrade and the R8500, up from 4,000 with the GeForceGTS all the way to over 13,000 is not a bad performance increase for spending under $200 at all IMHO.
All things told, I got a 9,500 point increase by spending $200 on a new motherboard and R9500Pro. With the Zalman cooler, I was able to ultimately overclock the card to 375core/450mem up from the stock settings of 275/275.
Overall
I have never been more pleased with a purchase of a single computer component before. After searching through several 3dMark scores and a few reviews on the web, I'm actually outscoring R9700Pro cards on systems with like CPU clock speeds--not bad for spending half the price. I can now run F12002 and mods (BPR! http://bprgt.rsdg.net) at 1280x1024x32bit with 4xFSAA and 16xAA enabled and still get 40-90FPS (depending on the number of cars visible), which is MORE than playable and looks very, very good. Vroom!
However, ATI has since released the next-gen cards in this family; the 9600 and 9800. The 9600 is actually *slower* than the 9500 at the same clock speeds, but since the 9600 is based on a .13u process instead of a .15u like the 9500, it is capable of MUCH higher clock speeds making the 9600Pro most likely a better performing card after it has been overclocked. If you are not interested in overclocking, then the 9500 series might indeed be a better buy even though the 9600 will be about $20 cheaper.
Quality drivers, outstanding picture quality, support for custom resolutions and refresh rates (useful if you are connecting to an HDTV or projector) and well above average performance in the sub-$200 price range make this card a winner in my book. The funny thing is, the price has actually GONE UP since it was released if that tells you anything-it also hasn't really dropped alot since the RV350 cards were released--I'd say get one fo these now from MWave or NewEgg while you can if you want one...
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 170
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Epinions.com ID:
psykosis_fc
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Member: Jeff
Location: Pasadena, CA
Reviews written: 42
Trusted by: 22 members
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