Advantages: High power (ish), pretty cheap
Disadvantages: heat

...! 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!... Read review

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Advantages: Great Value, Relaible
Disadvantages: No as good as 9800 series

...I wanted to buy a video card that could handle cames such as Call of Duty and NFSU2 easily with a bit to spare. I didn't want to break the bank, and although I was tempted by the 9800 series I opted to go for a sapphire 9600 pro(256mb). I must emphasize the importance of purchasing a pro model as opposed to a standard 9600. Although the pro is not as good as the xt, the price increase from the standard 9600 was minimal(a mere 2 pounds in my case!), so the performance upgrade was well worth the bit extra. I was constrained by the fact that I didn't have a pci express port only an agp, but I have been assured that I do not lose out by buying agp compatable technology at this stage. It is recommended to use this card with an 8x agp slot but using a 4x is fine. The all important core clock speed of the 9600 pro is 400mhz, compared... Read review

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Advantages: alot of features and power
Disadvantages: lack of analog output

...ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro is the perfect graphics adapter for the budget gamer. This card is in my system consisting of Gigabyte M52L-S3 with the AMD Athlon 64 3500+ and with 2 GB of DDR2 singelchannel RAM. In this setting, I have the standard 256 mb shared to 512 mb, with the top of 1 GB. This card is very fast. In my processor review, the fps shown for these games are done with this card. Only drawback is the lack of analog output. There are two HDMI outputs and a s-video, so you can hook up 2 HD TV sets. I tested it with two 32" HD screens and the card played a 2K film without any lag and distortion. Currently, I have a 19" widescreen LCD on it and it runs anything smooth and undistorted. My only problem is with 128 bit memory interface. As I use solid edge and other editing programs, this is not as smooth and fast... Read review

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Advantages: Cheaper than good brands
Disadvantages: not competitive enough

...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... Read review

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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 Radeon 9800 XT 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... Read review

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Advantages: Great image quality, price, shader 3.0, DirectX 9.0c, H264 support
Disadvantages: Not very fast, there are cheaper X1600's out there

...such unit is the Crucial Radeon X1600 Pro AGP 512Mb. Based on ATI's technology, this card has an interesting mix of features making it a compelling choice for anyone looking to upgrade an elderly graphics card. The PC I wanted to upgrade had what is now a rather dated card in the form of a Radeon 7500. Apart from being slow, it doesn't support many of the features any self-respecting modern graphics card should have. I chose the Crucial X1600 Pro to give the PC a mid-life kicker to help it make the most of newer games and technologies. Features The X1600 is certainly well featured. The obvious selling point is its support of the latest standards in the form of DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 3.0. It also offers HDR (High Dynamic Range) combined with full screen anti-aliasing. Connection wise it sports a dual-link DVI-I connector as well... Read review

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Advantages: Fast for a older gen card & stable thx to excellent driversupport
Disadvantages: too expensive compared to newer series of cards

...becourse its 55nm TSMC compared to the 80nm on the x1950pro & also some feats. such as UVD (Unified Video Decocer) that improves hardware acceleration when playing movies with a program that can let you enable HWA (Cyberlink PowerDVD 7.3 Ultra), especially DVD/HD & Blu-ray material. What this means in short is that your CPU is taking a smaller performance hit due to the fact that the grapicscard accelerates the material played resulting in smoother framerates in formats such as 720p/1080p.Now the x1950pro also provides HWA even though it´s not as efficient as UVD, yet acceptable .Oh I almost forgot the HDseries also supports sound via HDMI. So yes the radeon HD series are better/faster & very cheap especially the HD3850 256MB version & I can therefore not really justify shelling out about the same cash amount for the older x1950pro even... Read review

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Advantages: Superb Graphics Quality, Cheaper than some competitors
Disadvantages: Some users may not be able to afford it

...of the jargon: [Interface]: AGP 8x The Sapphire Radeon x800 Pro connects by AGP interface at a speed of 8x, with 4x supported. AGP is the common interface for most graphics cards, and the AGP slot on your motherboard is where the graphics card will be seated. Newer graphics cards and motherboards are moving to the PCI-express standard, providing an interface speed of 16x. If you want to buy a PCI-express graphics card, ensure your motherboard supports PCI-express. However, the x800 Pro does not use PCI-express but rather uses AGP, which is supported by the majority of motherboards today, so there is no worry about that. [Memory]: 256mb GDDR3 Video-Memory is used by graphics cards to store textures and the like that are in use, so the graphics processor can access these textures quickly. The higher the video-memory in the graphics card... Read review

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Advantages: many
Disadvantages: brands vary

...are likely to be sold a costly card by them dreaded IT salesmen. Now onto the geeky stuff.... ~ ATI X800Pro 256mb DDR3 ~ With my previous card lacking power and unable to play games to my satisfaction I decided to save up and get something with a little kick to it. After a fair bit of research into graphic card technology and prices I decided on this mainly due to its cost of £75 new. To give you a comparisson, I will list my previous card and the current card details. ATI Radeon 9600pro 256mb DDR Architecture : 256-bit GPU Speed : 400Mhz Memory Speed : 400Mhz (DDR 200x2) Memory size : 256mb Memory bandwidth : 9.6Gb/s Fill Rate : 1.6 Billion This card has 4 pipelines for graphics handling. ATI Radeon x800pro 256mb DDR3 Architecture... Read review

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Advantages: AGP Interface, DX10. No additonal power conectors, Very quite.
Disadvantages: Very very poor driver support

...of cards are Direct X10 compliant, making them the ideal choice to use on a Windows Vista machine. However due to their ability to decode high definition media content without using the computers main CPU, and along with their silent fans and low power ratings they also make great choices for many home theatre pc. But best of all they are available on the "old" AGP bus interface. This is why I purchased the Radeon 2400Pro AGP card. My HTPC is not exactly cutting edge technology in fact, most of the components inside it is about 5years old. In IT times scales it's a dinosaur. Purchasing new hardware for this wrinkly beast was almost a no no, the AGP bus has now been replaced by the much newer PCI interface. But then ATI released the Radeon AGP HD2XXXX serires of cards. Expectations for these cards were high; the rumour mill was abundant... Read review

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