ATI Radeon 9500 non pro Graphic Card Review

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Greg.'s Review of ATI Radeon 9500 non pro Graphic Card Graphics Card

15th Mar 2003

Overall Rating

5 stars
  • Value for money
    5 stars
  • Quality
    5 stars
Good Points

Performance, quality, price.


Bad Points

Bundled software.


General Comments

My 9500 Radeon is a third party card (Powercolor). The build of the card really is good, the packaging and instruction/installation guide really is first rate. My only gripe is that the card never came with any bundled games, I got Win Dvd though. The card has 64 meg of ram, this is highly overclockable; the core clocks up from 270mhz to 360mhz with no visable defects!. The memory clocks up from 275mhz to 330mhz with no problems whatsoever. I paid £109 from the local computer fair, the pro version was £20 more expensive. There was a reason I bought this card and not the pro version - with a software modification you can turn the non pro into a ........ wait for it.......PRO !!.

The only difference between the 2 cards is that the pro has 8 pipelines and the non pro 4. The software mod actually re-enables the other pipelines, bargain or what. Most people bang on about how poor ATI drivers are, this is something I have not experienced. The new cat 3.1 drivers have no problems at all running games/applications as far as I can tell. I am very impressed over the visual display quality of the card, the colours are a lot richer than on an Nvidia card. The 9500 is direct X 9 ready, this is good future proofing, drivers are updated on a regular basis and I can honestly say the performance of this card surpasses a Geforce 4 ti 4600 in some tests. Ok so it only has 64 meg of ram!, but hey - for the money it is just an amazing deal. Installation was a doddle - no problems at all!. Another bonus point is the fact that it is 8 x AGP ready, this means better bandwidth and greater performance.

The software mod is available for download on various sites from the internet, just type "Radeon 9500 software modification" into a search engine; you will be presented with the programme you need. I am very happy with the card and would recommend it to anyone.

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