Having built machines using the ATI Xpert 2000 pro (nice cheap all purpose card) I needed to upgrade my own system to something faster as my Viper II was objecting to a lot of the new games and support from Diamond had dried up. I decided to try the ATI Radeon 7200 which was reasonably priced and seemed to offer a bit more than the Xpert cards. The retail pack contains the card, manuals, CD and loads of cables and connectors for hooking up to a TV (the card has TV out as standard as well as VGA). Once installed in the machine, Windows identifies the card as a standard PCI VGA card and up it comes with no problems. Then comes the driver intallation.
The CD autoruns and gives you a number of options of which one is intall. This gives you the option to install the card drivers and mulitmedia center (version 7.2 with the DVD player). The installation of the drivers proceeds smoothly but sticks with a window saying configuring graphics devices. It looks as if the system has hung at this point but if you leave it for 5 to 10 minutes, it proceeds onto the directX installation. A reeboot later and the card is up and running on the ATI drivers.
In advanced display settings are a number of ATI tabs which allow you some degree of tweaking but keen to get on with, I left these alone. Testing with some of my older games, the card worked 100% and was noticably faster than my old card at doing the 3D graphics. It also ran the games my old card couldn`t run, with ease. Even with the resolution and graphics maxed up, gameplay was still smooth and even.
The only minor niggle is that at 640x480 and 800x600 resolution, the screen is displayed hard up against the left hand edge of the monitor but 1024x768 is nicely centered. If you switch resolutions a lot, you are likely to be twiddling with the monitor controls. One thing to note is that the RADEON 7200 drivers are NOT supported on Windows 95 (only 98 and higher) so if you are still running 95, stick with the Xpert range which have 95 drivers. S
ince I don`t have a GeForce 3 card, I can`t say how much slower the Radeon is (or if it is) but for the price, the Radeon does a damn good job.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
sorry for only the helpful,unfortunately a couple of typo's and the fact that i still don't know how much the cards is makes me be a bit stingey ...sorry
amend a little and i will re rate post haste :-)
It is so very nearly a v helpful...as it is a great op,
I look forward to re reading
cheers
jane
bwanamdevu 04.05.2002 13:04
A very informative opinion but a word of advice. Break it up into sections. It will read a lot easier if the script is divided into paragraphs. Paul.
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