Memories of Yesteryear (ATI Xpert 98)

Member Name: Galloway

Product:	ATI Xpert 98
Date:	12/06/01 (224 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap

Disadvantages: Limited Memory, Slow, Ageing Graphics Engine

The Ati Xpert 98 video card is now quite an old video card, having been around for about three years now. It was one of ATI’s earliest AGP offerings.

The card is based on the 64bit Rage Pro chipset from ATI, which has also featured in a number of other ‘Xpert’ cards from the company.

The card has 8MB of video ram onboard, offers up to 24bit colour for both 2D and 3D rendering and can shift around 1.25 million triangles per second, courtesy of its triangle set-up engine. Maximum screen resolution is 1600x1200 pixels in 24bit colour. 24bit equals a palette of 16.8 million colours.

The card is supplied with video drivers on CD and with the ATI software DVD player on CD in the retail pack, but without the DVD player as an OEM pack.

As this card is now quite old, its performance as shown above, is far below the performance of current technology. Having said that, it should be selling for a bargain price.

It is suitable for basic multimedia applications, office, image editing and any games that are not too demanding. However, it is far from the best for use with DVD, demanding games and 3D rendering.

Playing games is best done in 16bit colour; in 3D it produces a reasonable image quality but speed is lacking, so would require a powerful processor to make up the difference. It supports Direct 3D and OpenGL, but Open GL support isn’t good.

I purchased this card some years ago for £50, even then it was a budget card, but it did perform adequately at the time. Unfortunately as computing demands grow; it has been replaced by more powerful hardware. Apart from a really bargain bucket video card for office or basic Internet work, there is nothing I can recommend this card for.
Even though it should cost only about £30 now, a few extra pounds will by a far better card and work out much better value for money.

Summary: