ATI RADEON 9600 PRO - Graphics adapter - Radeon 9600 PRO - AGP 8x - 128 MB DDR - DVI - TV out

This card is an excellent compromise between high performance and ease of installation. Why?
First, It does not need to be hooked into the power supply like the 9500 pro, 9700 pro and 9800 pro or the high-end Nvdia cards. This can be tricky and crash your entire system if your power supply is not at least 300W. Next, this card does have a small fan above the processor heat sink, but it runs so cool because of the new processor technology and in tight installations does not make the next PCI slot unuseable because of the size of the fan. Also this fan is very quiet and not a noisy annoyance like in the GeForce 5900.
This card is a little slower than the top end cards, BUT also much less than half the price, it does support DirectX 9.0 and and all the latest shader etc. technologies. The perfomance differences are not noticeable to the average user unless you are a top end gamer. Therefor the excellent performance right at the top end together with the ease of installation...Read more

I had a measely ATI Rage 128 card before I bought this one. Suffice to say I noticed a massive difference in quality. I now play Unreal Tournament 2003 at 1024 * 768 with all detail settings maxed, and it plays so smooth!!
The Anubis map looks amazing!!

When I was getting around 2-3 FPS (frames per second) in games like Unreal2, Im now getting 100's of FPS.

My setup: P4 2.4Ghz, 512Mb PC2700 RAM.

I get around 11,000 3DMark2001 and 3300 in 3dMark03. ...

Installation:
No problems here. Removed old drivers, removed old card, installed new card, popped in CD which came with card, and I was gaming in about 15 mins.
There can be problems with installation however, with both NVIDIA and ATI cards, and so follow the instructions VERY CLOSELY.

I would recommend the Radeon 9500 Pro for people with a 300W+ power supply however. This card is a Radeon 9700 clone and uses the same PCB. It became to expensive for ATI to manufacture for a mainstream price (150-200$) and so it...Read more

In approaching an upgrade for my default dell graphics card I admit that, being a thrifty, stingy kinda guy, I was tempted by several different 3rd party cards, most of which weighed in around the $100 mark. In a titanic battle of instinct vs. cashflow I eventually decided to suck it up and get this card, which has been favourably regarded in most reviews. I'm no great computer whizz, so I can only review this from a user perspective - you can always check ATI's site for power and framerate specs.

The intsallation was pretty simple even for a scaredy-cat like moi - I followed the instructions closely, and didn't have any problems. All the new drivers worked fine, and its nice to have a greatly expanded menu of graphics options, included as software with the card.

I can honestly say that this card is the single biggest performance upgrade I've made, surpassing extra RAM by a mile. I had a blast running my newer games (Call of Duty, Battlefield 1942 etc) on higher resolutions...Read more