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Reviews
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Date product posted
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0
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Fri, June 3, 2005
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Recommended By
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Average Price
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Average Rating
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No recommendations
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None indicated
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None indicated
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Description:
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This is my first hardware review so bare with me, please.
I could make a copy-paste description from the offical site, but I think that it's always better to hear things from a gamer's point of view. And this is a happy gammer talking! First of all the GPU is very powerfull considering the price range it is in. My hardware is a bit outdated and can't support the 8x AGP engine that this board has, so therefor it is limited to AGP 4x, and still it works wonders!
The 400mhz processor can draw about 18FPS in flight simulator with most grafic settings at the max and in a 1024x768 resolution. I get screen-shot worthy images and still play the game without having it in slide-show mode.
Everything got even better when I overclocked the VPU. I have the card working at 450Mhz, which might not sound like much (remember I only have a AGP 4x board) of a change but it got me an extra 10FPS on Doom3. When using Omega drivers instead of the official set, I also get a couple of extra FPS.
If you're interesed in knowing how it handles other games here are some nice numbers for you to work with:
Game FPS - Min FPS - Max FPS - Average
Doom 3 10 60 31
Half-Life 2 23 57 41
NFSU 2 16 36 22
Silent Hill 4* 24 32 30
GTA: VC 37 125 73
*Frame Limited
Game Quality Settings Screen Resolution
Doom 3 High 800x600
Half-Life 2 Highest 1024x768
NFSU 2 Highest 800x600
Silent Hill 4* Highest 1024x768
GTA: VC Highest 1280x1024
Game settings are the ones that please me the most, and from which I can obtain a playable Frame Rate.
Most of the card features (like SMARTSHADER™ 2.1 and SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1), deliver fully DirectX 9 compatible eye-popping graphics, which for the price tag is the best you can have. Really... Playing Half-Life 2 in this baby, was a great experience, and from the ATI set of real time rendered demos I can't see any real diference between the 9600PRO Encore Edition, and the 9700 and 9800's engine beside the obviously higher clockspeeds.
The 256mb of video memory, also come in hand to support heavier textures but, let's face it... It ain't that big of a diference.
You can get a nice idea how good this card is from this chart. It's a bit outdated but it still shows you how it compares with the competition (Only Nvidia's Geforce 6900 Ultra and above can face it).
All-in-all, this is a good mid-range card. And although I fear it will be soon outdated, it has a great price/quality relation. In fact it's gotta be the best one in this price range (~ €100). If you got an older card, and don't have much to give to play the more graphic-demanding games, this is the best bet!
I actually don't have any downside. I see people complaining about ATI's chipsets giving some problems but I've had non so far, and the ocasional image artifact I get while playing, is due to the overclocking. But there's a lot of driver-level tweaking to be made, specialy if get the latest omega drivers.
So defenetly 2 thumbs up for this one. It's worth every cent you pay for it, and it defenetly can render any game you can think of, with high settings, still give you a decent frame rate.
You can get more technical information at the official website, but I really hope this helps you selecting your mid-range gfx card.
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Product Link:
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http://www.gecube.com/mbu/productCategory.php?proID=59
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;)
;)
;)