Advantages: It's fast, it's by a respectable company, takes one only one slot Disadvantages: Value for money? What value for money?
So here we have it ladies and gents, a graphics card that would rock your wok, own up your games and make that smug look on your mate's face vanish like somebody kick him between the legs. You will get all this, for a price of course.
This card comes with everything standard that other Radeon cards come with such as AGP 8x support, 2 monitor ports, 1 S-Video port and a massive heatsink/fan with it's name on it.
Installation is a sinch. Just open up PC, remove old graphics card, slide this graphics into it's place, screw it in and it's installed. Hard part would be wondering if you should upgrade the RAM and/or CPU in case it's a bottleneck.
The Creative ATI Radeon9800XT is a very fast graphics card. It comes with 256MB DDR video RAM and has the a highly clocked GPU core and RAMDAC clock speed. I can play Far Cry at 64 FPS ...
The ATI RADEON9800xt has a new video processing unit called the R360, it was manufactured on a 0.15 micron process with 115 million transistors and has a VPU speed 412 MHz, the onboard memory has raised from 128mb to 256mb running at 730 MHz and capable of delivering up to 23.3 GB per second.
The top of the card has a copper plate, covered with rolled copper fins, and top by a plastic cover, the bottom also has a copper plate used to absorbed heat from memory modules. This video card has a very big fan and it adjusted according to the cores temperature and includes a thermocouple to monitor the card?s temperatures.
The Sapphire includes all of the complementary hardware you need, including a power extension, a DVI-to-VGA adapter and an S-Video to composite output for the television plus a Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness ...
speed, overclocking) that came with the card and quickly found a less intrusive alternative.
It may well be that my unfortunate experiences with this card have been pure bad luck and a complete coincidence.
Still - don't throw that guarantee away when you buy the ASUS 9800XT as It may well turn out to be the most important component!
I'd like to be as upbeat and enthusiastic about this card as PCHome were in their glowing review of it. Maybe my third one will be better than the previous two? ...
Product Information for "PowerColor RADEON 9800XT" »
Processor / memory
Graphics Processor / Vendor
ATI Radeon 9800 XT
RAMDAC Clock Speed
400 MHz
Video Memory Installed
256 MB
Technology
DDR SDRAM
Ciao
Listed on Ciao since
30/03/2008
Manufacturer's product description
9800XT series is the ultimate accelerator of the most demanding next generation 3D titles, scenes and environments. Complex shader effects and full precision computation are rendered with blistering frame rates, resulting in smooth, interactive animation of organic, complex environments. R360 series introduces a new standard of performance to graphics-intensive applications. Backed by highly programmable cinematic shader engines and support for the latest Microsoft DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL feature sets, 9800XT series is designed to bring the most detailed worlds to life with motion picture quality effects. Employing billions of color variations and high precision pixel processing at all performance levels, R360 series delivers cinematic graphics with a new level of quality and consistency. Experience unparalleled 3D visual realism with the advanced engineering of ATI technology. SMOOTHVISION 2.1 delivers the sharpest, clearest picture quality imaginable. SMARTSHADER 2.1 enables 128-bit full floating point precision for hyper-realistic imagery. FULLSTREAM removes blocky artifacts from streaming Internet video to deliver smoother looking, higher quality online content. 9800XT series of graphics processors beats with the heart of a champion, thanks to the industry's only cinematic Visual Processing Unit (VPU) in its 3rd generation. Backed by the latest CATALYST software suite, 9800XT series optimizes performance, power and stability to surpass the most exacting next-generation gameplay requirements.
