ATI RADEON 9600 PRO PC & Mac Edition

...realise you could buy an ATI radeon 9550 with 256Mb RAM and a nearly identical performance for cheaper. It can easily be overclocked with no extra cooling to outperform my 9600 pro, and i've been slated a few times off computer geeks for not knowing this before.

If i were you, i'd definately buy this if you're looking for a cheap but powerful graphics card to work on graphics processing / CAD, but also if you're a light-medium gamer ... more

Bought one of these a while ago on a uk site for around £35 which is perfect seeing as i'm a student and i needed a powerful graphics card on a tight budget for the design work i need for my course, and in my opinion this card is nearly perfect for the job!

The 256mb of onboard memory take the strain off the ram in the motherboard, freeing up more memory for applications whilst providing great graphics.

Installation was a piece of p!55 to be honest, i just slotted the card in, fired up my pc and it detected the card, asked for the drivers and was up and running in 10 mins. it even disabled my onboard graphics card for me!

I'm not much of a gamer but i messed around a bit online and with a few games such as far cry, this card handles most games on medium to high settings pretty well, but that's not what i bought it for so this is just an added bonus.

The fan on the card isn't too large but it's very quiet which is great when i'm working into the wee hours of the morning and i don't have to put up with all the whining noises drowning out my thoughts.

There's a program called ATITool which is free to download that lets you push the performance speeds of the card way up easily. i found that i didn't really need to do this as the card can handle any number-crunching i throw at it, but gamers would find this invaluable.

The one downside to the graphics card was that it pushed the temperature inside my case up by a good 7 or 8 degrees (c), which made quite a difference wth hard drive performance. an arctic cooling silencer and RAM heatsinks quickly sorted this out for £17 so no complaints there, now my pc is running even cooler than it was before the card!

The card isn't too power hungry, it works fine on my 350W power supply that was supplied with my budget pc (£235 but powerful nevertheless)

So far you'd think this card was a really great buy. and don't get me wrong, i love it. but unfortunately i didn't realise you could buy an ATI radeon 9550 with 256Mb RAM and a nearly identical performance for cheaper. It can easily be overclocked with no extra cooling to outperform my 9600 pro, and i've been slated a few times off computer geeks for not knowing this before.

If i were you, i'd definately buy this if you're looking for a cheap but powerful graphics card to work on graphics processing / CAD, but also if you're a light-medium gamer who isn't too serious, although seriously consider the 9550 before you go ahead and buy a 9600.

Hope this helps! 

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