johnenfield's Full Review: ATI RADEON® 9800 XT, (256 MB) AGP Video Card
For the specs and details about what the card has to offer, I humbly defer to oneazn2nv's detailed review. I'd like to add my experiences with buying, installing and using the card.
I agree that the Radeon 9800 XT 256 MB DDR is one great card. I've had 3DFX Voodoo's and lately ATI's since Voodoo went the way of the dodo and have been happy with them overall. I've also played on friends' PC's who have Nvidia cards over the years. This is the best video card yet. Even set on its default settings right out of the box it does great. With a little tweaking using its handy controls that show up in the advanced section of the display settings on Windows XP, it really screams through all but the most graphics intensive moments in games like Medal of Honor, Battlefield Vietam, Thirteen and Call of Duty. It has a little trouble with Halo unless you turn a few video settings down for the game, but then, Halo's system requirements are unreasonably high compared to many other recent games.
I bought the card at Comp USA after researching it in gaming magazines like PC Gamer, Computer Games and Electronic Gaming Monthly also online on sites like GameSpot and Tom's Hardware. After reading their reviews, I decided to take the plunge and go for the 256 MB version. I previously had a Radeon 9700 128 MB card that did ok on the above games and others if you turned down a few graphics settings. Playing games like Quake II and Halo at LAN parties kind of bit because you had to turn down the graphics so much to get smooth frame rates that they looked like Doom :( I researched the price online and thought CompUSA's price was reasonable for a brand new card, plus like the other reviewer said, it's a little dicey getting parts like cards online. One mistake I made in getting it at CompUSA was in having them install it. They did a poor job and several games didn't play right at all when I got it home. They would crash and lock up unexpectedly. Some like Halo would stutter and slow to a crawl in the opening sceens.
I took my PC to a very good local PC repair shop where I live and they tested it out. It turned out that it wasn't the card's fault. I needed a more powerful power supply, better cooling solutions and newer drivers that my PC had. If you think of getting this card, I highly recommend looking at your PC's other parts too and see if any of them need upgraded before you get the card. I upgraded my power supply from a 300 Watt to a 380; my stock AMD Athlon cooling fan for a CoolerMaster system; added a fan that goes in one of the PCI slots and blows air directly on the card and had them tweak and upgrade drivers on all the other parts of my PC. I already had 512 MB of DDR Corsair RAM.
Hooking up this card is different than any other card I've seen. The power supply plug on the card is larger than on the 9700. You have to plug the power supply for the Hard Drive into it, then plug the Hard Drive's power plug into the adapter that's on the video card's plug. It has a little lock that you have to hold open while you slide the card into place. The lock's a good idea, especially if you haul your PC to LAN parties, but it does make installing a little tricky. The card is a lot bigger than the 9700, so you may have to do some rerouting of your wire job if your old card barely fit before.
With my new fans up and going, my PC is a little louder than it was before, but I don't mind since I know I won't fry my card this way. As I said, this card is awesome! It plays my games so much better than the 9700 did. I can play Call of Duty online over a DSL connection with all the settings on full and have no lag as long as the server I'm on has a good ping. Servers with not so good pings make it lag and chop a bit if there is a lot of movement on the screen. Playing games single player offline is flat out amazing. Even the mighty Halo barely slows it down.
Yes, this card isn't what you'd call a budget card, but I saved up for it. It was worth the upgrade.
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