Good budget buy, but not for the 3d Gamer (ATI Xpert 2000 Pro)

Name: LegendaryMrDude

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Product:	ATI Xpert 2000 Pro
Date:	01/08/01 (101 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: TV-OUT, Hardware DVD acceleration, Cheap

Disadvantages: Slow, Not a good buy for 3d Games!

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 colour and can happily go all the way to 2048 x 1536 (still in 32bit colour).

But it is s l o w.

To put that into context, it's slow when playing graphics intensive games (Quake, Black & White etc). Maybe it'd because I'm only running it with an AMD K6-2 500Mhz CPU, but it certainly didn't give me the performance increase over the Diamond Viper that I was hoping for. Benchmarks between the two showed that, at best, I was getting maybe an extra 5 FPS in Quake. In Black and White the game sometimes dropped to less than 1FPS!!!

Perhaps I was expecting too much, after all it is aimed at the budget end of a market that can see prices range from <£50 to >£300. I suppose it does give me a half-decent excuse to upgrade my CPU though.

On the up-side, the drivers have been a LOT more stable than the Diamond drivers ever were. They are updated a lot more frequently as well. All manner of display properties can be tweaked through the drivers, although there is precious little in the way of explanation as to what most of it does.

So to be fair, it's a perfectly capable graphics card, PROVIDED you DON'T want to play 3d intensive games. If all you want is a card that has hardware DVD playback, TV-Out and can support true-colour in very high resol
utions it fits the bill fine.

Summary: