Try this for a quiet computer (Connect3D Radeon 9600)

Member Name: Darkle

Product:	Connect3D Radeon 9600
Date:	21/06/04 (324 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quick, Quiet, Passivly cooled

Disadvantages: not as fast as XT equivilents

The ATi Radeon 9600 is in my opinion one of the greatest advances in modern GFX technology. Yet it seems to have completly passed most people by.

I used to be asked what the best Graphics card would be for a quiet system, and now I always say the Radeon 9600 non-pro. The reasons?

It is completly passive, it will work in pretty much any case as long as there is some air flow.

It's a Direct-X 9 core, so it will play most of the modern upcoming games, and has all the nice pixel shader effects, bump mapping etc.

It's surprisingly fast. This is where I think most people don't really appreciate what a brilliant piece of engineering this was on ATis part. In a reasonably fast system say 2.8ghz P4 with 1024mb ram, you can expect scores of about 9000-11000 in 3DMark 2001SE. To give you an idea of comparison, a radeon 9700 will get between 14000-15500, and a 9800 XT will get anything from 16000-17000. More importantly, Nvidias passive offering, the Ge-Force FX 5200 only gets about 3000-5000. This is where the real comparisson is, because most of Nvidias offering above this use loud fans, and still don't come near to the 9600 which just sits there with a small block of aluminium on the core. Very impressive.

Support From ATi. ATi have a set of drivers for the Radeons called the Catalyst drivers, these are updated all the time, and ATi activly respond to customer issues, right from big incompatibilities, to a texture not showing right in a game.

So if you are looking to make your computer quiet, cut down on noise, but don't want to give up that little edge on GFX performance give this card a try, they are excellent value for money and can be found in the region of £70 - £80.

Thanks for reading.

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