High performance midrange card
Written: Apr 04 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, quality components, DX9 compatible, easy to overclock, lots of user adjustments available.
Cons: It is not a 9800 Pro.
The Bottom Line: This is a moderately priced high performance midrange graphics card that can breath new life into an older system.
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| skybird1's Full Review: Power Color RADEON 9600 PRO 128 MB AGP Video Card |
I have a three year old Dell Dimension 8100 P4-1.7 that had a GeForce 2 graphics card. This graphics card was showing its age; especially when my son was playing the newer games. Most of the newer games had to run at minimum resolutions with most options at the lower levels. He never complained about it but I decided it was time to upgrade the graphics anyway. I was not sure if purchasing a new graphics card would really make a major difference in performance, other than for improved game play.
The Radeon 9800 appeared to be the top-of-the-line graphics card available, but I did not want to spend a lot money. After reading various reviews and performance measurements, I settled on the Radeon 9600. I purchased a Powercolor Radeon 9600 Pro graphics card.
The retail version came with an S-Video cable, DVI to RGB Converter, RCA Cable, RCA to S-Video Cable, and a driver CD-ROM. Also included is an instruction manual and a few packaged games, of which a couple were the full versions and the others were demos. The graphics card appeared to be well built with a heat sink and a fan built into it.
The first thing I did was to uninstall the Nvidia drivers for the GeForce 2 graphics card then shut the system down. I unplugged the power cord, opened the case and removed the old graphics card from the AGP slot and installed the Powercolor 9600 Pro card. I did notice that the Powercolor card had two key slots on the edge connector whereas the GeForce card has three key slots. I don’t know what that is all about. Perhaps it is to prevent use of the card in very old machines. Nonetheless, the 9600 Pro card fit nicely in the Dell AGP slot. I closed the system and powered it on. The new hardware was detected and I installed the drivers from the included CD disk.
The first thing I noticed was that something was different. The desktop looked better. It seemed better in color; not brighter or sharper, but richer in color. During Web surfing or when opening a Microsoft Office document, the print looked clearer and richer in appearance. I found this to be a pleasant surprise and had not expected any improvement for normal use. Next I loaded a game and changed the settings to the high end and was really impressed with the smoothness of the controls and the dramatically improved appearance. The textures and colors were most impressive. My son now wants to replay all the older games just to see how they look. This graphics card has breathed new life into this old Dell system.
Because the card had a heat sink with a fan on it, I opened the case after a couple of hours to see how hot the card was becoming. I found it to be relatively cool.
With such a surprising visual improvement, I went to the Internet in search of information. The first thing I did was to update the driver from the ATI Web Site. Next I located a utility called Rage3D Tweak. It allows adjustment of the numerous settings available for the card. It also allows overclocking the Radeon chip and this card overclocked easily. Not being such a techie, I have it moderately overclocked to about 5 % (both the Radeon CPU and the memory). I did push it at over 10% for a while and I am sure it will function much higher.
Summary
If you have a really old graphics card and want to extend your computers life, this is a moderately priced high performance mid-range card. It appears to be adequate for most of the newer games.
Links:
Powercolor - http://www.power-color.com/
Rage3D Tweak - http://downloads.driverheaven.net/R3Dtweak39.zip
ATI Radeon Catalyst Drivers - http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/winxp/radeonwdm-xp.html
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 150.00
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Epinions.com ID:
skybird1
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Location: Albuquerque, NM, USA
Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 1 member
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