PowerColor ATI 9800

Introduction

The graphics card industry has developed leaps and bounds over the past few years. To cut a long story short, the only major players currently in the market are ATI and NVIDIA, with some one time big players such as Matrox still around in some form.

The PowerColor ATI 9800 graphics card supplied by Komplett is designed as a top of the range graphics card, only surpassed by its siblings (the 9800 Pro and 9800 XT respectively).




The 9800 series cards from ATI are based on the new R350 chipset, a higher clocked and tweaked R300 core. The R300 was used to much sucess in the 9700 series cards. The ATI 9800 card is exactly the same as a 9800 Pro card, except for a difference in clock speeds.

• ATI 9800 Series Core
• 325Mhz Core Clock Frequency
• 128 Meg 290Mhz DDR Memory
• Eight Parallel rendering pipelines
• AGP 8x Support
• SmartShader 2.1, Smoothvision 2.1, HyperZ III+, TruForm 2.0, VideoShader, FullStream Technologies
• Fully supports DX9.0 and OpenGL feature sets

The core clock frequency actually matches that of the previous ATI 9700 Pro graphics card, and the memory clock is actually slightly slower. Although this graphics card does have a whole host of other tweaks and improvements to the R350 core to ensure it can outperform this in most (if not all) tests.

Included Items

• ATI 9800 Graphics Card
• User Manual
• Software CD
• Game Demo CD
• Comanche 4
• Summoner
• WinDVD
• S-Video Cable
• Composite Video Cable
• S-Video > Composite Adapter
• Power Cable

PowerColor don't just supply the ATI 9800 graphics card, they supply a 'bundle'. The card comes packaged in a very plush box and does not skimp on the included items, it looks like a quality card upon first glance (and matched in price).

Everything you need to get up and running is included, as well as cables for connecting the card to items such as TVs. It was good to see that PowerColor have supplied a small games bundle and a demo CD, but disappointing that the full versions are all 2001-era games, which don't take advantage of the card's full capabilities.