Advantages: Good solid midrange card that won't let you down with some overclocking potential.
Disadvantages: A little bit too middle range given superior competition for less.

...items...although I did not use the driver disc, relying on an online download. Performance: This is the really important part of all my ramblings, and for the most part I will just let the benchmarks speak for themselves and leave a performance conclusion for the end. Testing method: Everything run at 1024x768 (32-bit colour) on an XP2800+, 1GB DDR333, MSI KT400, 160GB 7200rpm HD. Only 4xAA and 4xAF run in Call of Duty benchmark. WinXP SP1 and latest catalyst and Detonator drivers used. Benchmarks: DX9 Pixel shader Mother Nature in 3Dmark 2003 (FPS): 9800SE OC (410, 680): 24.9 9800SE stock: 22.8 5700Ultra: 20.5 5700Ultra OC (600,1002): 28.2 9800XT: 36.4 5950U: 34.5 Single and Multi-Fillrate in 3Dmark 2003 (Single/Multi in Mtexels/s): 9800SE OC (410, 680): 953.6/1511.6 9800SE stock: 835.9 / 1378 5700Ultra... 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: Small, practically weightless, high tech, durable, gives you KILLER graphics, perfect for games.
Disadvantages: Quite expensive, uses up a lot of pc power

...of by itself, choosing the best options for the best graphics and performance. In Nvidia- you have to enable them- manually. That is the only difference that i can think of. Specs: 128 Mb of SDRAM ....WOW....! 340MHz Integrated graphics system Direct X 9.0(latest) Price: 200GBP Minimum Requirements: 128 MB of system memory Intel® Pentium® 4/III/II/Celeron™, AMD® K6/Athlon® or compatible with AGP 8X/4X/2X slot You will need a CD-ROM drive to run the installation Operating Systems: Windows 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP. At LEAST 15 Mbs of free HD space for drivers. (hope that helped) Quite frankly, I didnt see much difference between my old Radeon 9600 card and my new 9800 one. There were only a few more features. But the difference was OBVIOUS when i compared the performance of my games with my friend, who had a graphics card... Read review

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Advantages: Its Big Red And Powerful
Disadvantages: Small Fan,A Little Outdated

...Ok when i decided it was time for a new computer i figured this was the card for me.Quick and affordable with decent graphics. Before this i was on 4meg intergrated graphics so u can imagine what its like.When i first did everythign and got it ready to use i thought ok ill coax it in on facry on low eveything.I Whizzedd thru the game. Then i thought the hell with it ill try it on max......absolute gaming bliss.All of mygames were amazingly high definition and with the new 910 catalyst drivers its a dream come true for me. and imaine my delight when valve release information that half life 2 was desigened for MY graphcs card-the 9800 Pro.Anyway enough of my anecdotes heres the real info : GPU RADEON 9800 PRO Processing technology 0.15µ GPU Speed 380Mhz Memory Type/Size 128MB Samsung 2.8ns BGA DDR SDRAM Memory Clock 340Mhz... Read review

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Advantages: Reliable, Fast, Overclockable to an XT Easily
Disadvantages: Slightly dated compared to X800/850

...The 9800 Pro is a very good card by itself, but it is a pure case of ATI's greediness. Certain chipsets are identical to the XT, only with certain features disabled. One specific chipset of the 9800 Pro has the temperature monitoring chip of the XT installed, but disabled. Therefore, ATI can obviously manufacture cards for very low prices, becasue they take one chipset, disable some of the more advanced features, and sell it for less. When you think about it, its is just plain wrong, because there people are, purchasing XT cards for extreme prices when all they had to do was buy a Pro and mod it. The most adractive feature is that you don't even need to phisically mod the card, so by modding it, you do not void warranty (as long as you remember to switch it back to its former, less powerful state before you claim warranty). All... Read review

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Advantages: Fast
Disadvantages: noisy

...I bought this card on the strength of an excellent review in PCHome magazine. It's a nice card in many ways, available in 128Mb and 256Mb flavours, capable of running the latest games with ease. Sad to say, the fans started to get noisy during bootup. They sounded awful. I was fortunate enough to get a replacement. But guess what? A couple of months later and that noise has started on the replacement! Overclockers UK are happy to replace the replacement luckily. Postage with insurance costs nearly £20 so I'm going to end up paying around £40 for the two times this has happened. Software: the DVD software isn't bad - it's an ASUS badged version of PowerDVD. The games are quite old, and the utlitites either didn't work or were not things I'd need. The main inclusion of interest was a voucher for Half Life 2. Even... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, superb graphics
Disadvantages: Expensive

...The ATI RADEON 9800xt 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... Read review

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Advantages: "works" with Mac and Windows
Disadvantages: Too many to list.

...... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, great visual quality, 8 pixel pipelines, 256-bit memory bus, 256MB, great package, cheaper than most rivals, quiet and compact,
Disadvantages: Expensive, replaced by the x800xt, runs very hot, Overdrive is pointless

...and VPU. Other technologies used to process the 3D scene include anti-aliasing, anisotropic and isotropic filtering. For ATI, this is called SmoothVision 2.1 (now upgraded to 3.0 for the latest cards), but the same general principle applies. In terms of pixel and vertex shaders, ATI proudly conforms to the DX9 standard under the name SmartShader 2.0 including support for 96-bit colour precision rather than full floating point accuracy which Nvidia offers with 128-bits. The 9800XT is a true DX9 part that conforms in absolutely every specification, including how many operations can be processed per vertex during the rendering pipeline. Having mentioned the pipeline, this is the point where GPU firms are historically the most divergent in their implementation of it. A pipeline in the most crude sense is when you put in all the data... Read review

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Advantages: Great speed, the best for high resolution gaming, lifetime warrent + great customer support from BFG
Disadvantages: Hot & can be loud, a large card (27cm)

...the trappings like antialising. Dual or triple SLI 8800GTXs will outperform SLI'd 9800GTXs at those settings every time on the most hardware-challenging games. Even the gargantuan 9800GX2 doesn't match up to the 8800s, as each of the two GPUs on that card only has 512mb memory. So, you want to play the latest games? You have a decent monitor? You're going to need one - or two - of these. And the BFG OC2 model is top of the bunch. The 8800s run hot, yes, and can be loud, but if you want the best, it's a necessary sacrifice. With BFG's lifetime warranty, even if you shove three of these in one machine and they cook themselves from all the heat, they'll still allow you to RMA them.... Read review

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