Radeon 9200 or what?

[Olin K. McDaniel]

Recently I decided to upgrade my video card, as the first step in an
eventual systematic upgrade of my whole system. It's based on a PIII
at 600 MHz, and will go to P4 at 3+ GHz when finished. However the
existing GeForce 4 Ti4200 video card is steadily failing, so needed
to tackle that first.

With the new top end ATI and nVidia cards coming out, and the prices
of the former topend ones dropping I decided to spring for an ATI
Radeon 9800 Pro, at the current ~$240. That is, until I discovered
that it won't work with Windows 98SE, which I use along with Windows
2000 in a dual boot setup. Since I do not plan to give up on W98, nor
do I plan to go with Win XP Pro (which I have and don't like), I
looked around for an alternate video card for the short term.

I ordered what I thought was a genuine ATI Radeon 9200 card for this
interim period. When it arrived, I discovered it was not made by ATI,
but rather had a Sapphire name on it, but with ATI chipset and
software. More to the point, it says it's a Radeon 9800 SE, which I
later figured out means Secondary. So, just what do I have? It has
no specs saying what core or clock speed it uses, and I don't know how
to measure it. From using this for several hours, it seems to be
perfectly satisfactory for routine work. But how well will it perform
with my current flight sims, for example. I know my PIII limits
here, but after upgrading that, will this card manage to keep up to
the demand?

In short - where does this Sapphire Radeon 9200 SE card fall in the
rankings?

Thanks,

Olin McDaniel

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[Cuzman]

" I ordered what I thought was a genuine ATI Radeon 9200 card for this
interim period. When it arrived, I discovered it was not made by ATI, but
rather had a Sapphire name on it, but with ATI chipset and software. More
to the point, it says it's a Radeon 9800 SE, which I later figured out means
Secondary. So, just what do I have? "


A much better card than a 9200, that's what.

 

[NightSky 421]

In short - where does this Sapphire Radeon 9200 SE card fall in the
rankings?

If you ordered a 9200SE and got a 9800SE, I'd say you got a great deal!
The 9200SE is a pretty low-end card. I bought one for my PIII-933 box
about three months ago and it cost $75 plus tax (Canadian dollars) for the
128MB version. I could have got the 64MB version for $65 plus tax.

 

[Augustus]

?

In short - where does this Sapphire Radeon 9200 SE card fall in the
rankings?

In the first part of your post you say you got a 9800SE.....in the last
sentence you say 9200SE. A 9800SE is decent....very decent in fact.....in
fact your processor will fall far short of the mark to running it any where
near even 1/2 of it's potential. If you got a 9200SE you got the crappiest,
slowest card in ATI's current lineup. Your old Geforce4 Ti4200 is 4 times
the card of a 9200SE. So you need to take a closer look at what you've got.

 

[Olin K. McDaniel]

?


In the first part of your post you say you got a 9800SE.....in the last
sentence you say 9200SE. A 9800SE is decent....very decent in fact.....in
fact your processor will fall far short of the mark to running it any where
near even 1/2 of it's potential. If you got a 9200SE you got the crappiest,
slowest card in ATI's current lineup. Your old Geforce4 Ti4200 is 4 times
the card of a 9200SE. So you need to take a closer look at what you've got.

Yep - you are correct, I goofed. I intended to type 9200SE in both
instances, and let the brain get addled as often happens.

OK, so I got a very low end card from what the consensus says. Well,
the price was about 1/4 what I paid for the GeForce4 Ti4200 over a
year ago. But it died in less than 10 months, so let's hope this
9200SE lasts until I build an entire new system in the next 8 - 12
months.

Thanks for all the replies.

Olin McDaniel
To reply by email, please remove "abcd" from Return address

 

[DaveW]

The 9200SE is a slowwed down 9200, which is itself considered a rather
underpowered card. Basically you just have to decide if it performs what
you need it to.