21 out of 21 people found this review helpful.
King of the hill in graphics cards.
Date of Review: Sep 19, 2003
The Bottom Line: The fast 9800 pro will not disappoint. The newest iterations of the catalyst drivers appear to be flawless. The only mark it gets is for the hefty price tag.
I've been building my own PC's for a long time. I typically standardize on the best components money can buy. While speed is important to me, stability is paramount. In the past, ATI has had a lot of issues with driver stability in their products, and that's kept me on the NVIDIA side of the road.
I decided to try the ATI side of things about a year after the Radeon 9700 pro was released. I kept reading about the driver improvements and it appeared that ATI was being VERY proactive about making a great product. I started using the Radeon 9700 with the catalyst 2.8 set of drivers. They were "stable", but they DID suffer from some glitches in some games - most notably Dark Age of Camelot. While it worked fine in standard mode, turning on FSAA (full scene anti-aliasing, a method of reducing jagged edges on polygons) or AF (Anisotropic filtering, a filtering method to improve texture quality across distances) would make DAOC crash. Interestingly enough, this turned out to be a problem with Dark Age of Camelot and not the ATI drivers.
By the time the Radeon 3.0 drivers came out, all the games I played worked flawlessly. Then the 9800 pro came out right as I was building a new 3.0ghz P4 based on the i875 chipset. I gave it a shot, and have not looked back since.
We're now up to the 3.6 version of the ATI catalyst drivers, and they work flawlessly. I can throw any game at them and the drivers work perfectly with no issues. The card itself is fast and quiet - one of the things that drove NVIDIA to tears when they released their original GeforceFX product that sounded much like a leaf-blower in your PC.
Installation is a breeze, just pop it into your AGP slot (requires a 4x or 8x AGP slot) and install the catalyst drivers from ATI's website. Don't use the stuff that comes with the card, since it's obviously going to be an older version. Since ATI has been on top of their driver releases, you should keep them updated if you buy a lot of new games since they always incorporate speed and compatibility improvements.
Recently there's been a lot of buzz about Half Life 2. It appears that preliminary benchmarks put the Radeon 9800 on top of the heap when used with Half Life 2. To be completely fair though, the Nvidia 5900 Ultra seems to score better than the Radeon 9800 pro in Doom 3. Since it seems more people are looking forward to Half Life 2 after the raging success the original Half Life enjoyed, you're likely better off choosing this card over the Nvidia 5900 ultra.
While a 256MB version of the 9800 pro exists, there are NO games that will currently take advantage of this amount of memory. I personally don't recommend the more expensive model.
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