When I first bought this card it cost me £90 cheaper than it equivalent cards priced at £120 and I soon found out why.
Being a regular gamer back then I needed a faster and better graphics card and decided on this one. Being cheaper than the rest and had 256mb onboard I thought this will be impressive. Got home, easy enough to install, just slot in AGP slot, turn pc on and then install software from disc. Great ! It's working, at least I haven't damaged it putting it in. Ran a few tests and results were not so good, infact it hardly improved over my previous card so I thought oh well must be pc is too slow.
The card is supposed to be 400 core and 400 memory(200x2 as in ddr) but it installs at just under 400 on both core and memory. Manually adjusting this causes the card to create artifacts ingame(glitches to non tech's) so you have to install it as default.
With the card running at default I'm thinking well lets try some games as it is twice as fast or supposed to be twice as fast as my old card. Ran a few games with an improvement in performance and quality of picture but still nothing worth the £90 I paid for it. However, I put that down to my pc and left it as there was an increase. Later in the year I upgraded my pc and kept card, again there was a slight increase in performance but nothing special. A year later I decide to upgrade my PC again this time to a 64bit machine, great I think, I will now see the true power of card - err nope, once again a slight increase but nowhere near the ability of other cards my friends have even with 128mb onboard.
My personal opinion on this card is why did I stray away from the main brands ? At the time of buying it, for an extra £30 I could have got a card that would still be good today.
My advice for people who are not sure about graphics cards, keep to the well know brands, pay attention to the core speed, memory speed, whether its ddr/ddr2/ddr3 and how many pipelines it has(think of it as traffic on a 2 lane motorway is slow but then 2 more lanes open and traffic goes faster, the more lanes the less bottlenecking). If you have to save money maybe think about buying a card from a good brand but with less features or smaller amount of memory.
Don't know if it's just me being unlucky or it's the GeCube brand use cheap PCB and chips even though the core is ATI.
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codiak - it depends on the manufacturer, if i would have gone with say, Sapphire, MSI, ASUS, GIGABYTE or another know make it would have been a lot better but I think GeCube are a budget/value brand.
codiak 17.05.2006 13:47
i had the 9800 pro all in wonder 128MB, it was a damm good card too very fast. Are you sure you didnt end up with an SE or other factory crippled version of the card?
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