ATI Xpert 2000 Pro

I'm the kind of person that looks for good quality as well as value and one day I stumbled on the ATI Xpert 2000 Pro. I was looking for a decent graphics card for <£100 and the xpert 2000 pro seemed to match it. 3d graphics, dvd decoding, 32mb memory, tv out and would fit nicely into my new PC system. The ordinary display is fast and reliable and can serve both the monitor and tv at the same time with high resolutions, colour and refresh rates. You can get monitor and tv resolutions past 1280x1024 with 32bit colour (if the tv supports it!) and it has seamless integration between both modes. The DVD decoding really took a lot of work of my CPU ...

I have always liked ATi video cards, mainly because I have experienced far fewer problems with them than any other. So when I wanted to upgrade (cheaply) from my old Diamond Viper V550, I naturally checked out what ATi had to offer. Boasting 32Mb of on-board video RAM, a 350MHz RAMDAC and TV-out as well as dedicated 3d processing and hardware DVD playback, the Xpert 2000 (Pro) looked too good to be true. So I bought one. Installation was as easy as ever, it's an AGP card with a reasonable heat-sink on the main chip but not big enough to cause any space problems. The TV-out works fine. It's currently driving my monitor at 1280 x 1024 in 32bit ...

To be honest, I got this card included with my computer bundle, but it is surprisingly capable. I've heard that you can buy it for around £70 and this represents excellent value for a 32MB graphics card which supports Open GL. It may not be as fast as a GeForce or later voodoos, but it certainly has enough juice (combined with my Pentium III 650) to cope with 800 x 600 on even the most 3D intensive games. For sheer looks, I'd reccomend looking at Rollcage Stage II. This shows off the performance nicely, with all its lightng effects. I would recommend this card to anyone who doesn't want to spend a fortune on a graphics card, but would ...