Crucial Review :) (Sapphire Radeon 9100)

Member Name: fluffkin

Product:	Sapphire Radeon 9100
Date:	14/05/03 (2737 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Smooth drivers (so far), DirectX 8.1 with style, Cheap! (read that again, CHEAP!)

Disadvantages: Not the fastest, No DirectX 9 support

Hiya,
Ok, first up, I got a Crucial Radeon 9100 128MB AGP, but there wasn't anywhere to enter the info. I guess they are very very similar, mines got S-Video, DVI and regular VGA outputs, pretty soon I'll try the DVI to VGA convertor and have dual screen display (yay!).

The Reasons: I had a Geforce 2 MX 200, nice card in it's time but now sadly outdated. I'm a budget buyer... My target purchase was £50, I blew it, this one with P&P was £65... Oh well...

The Goodies: Worked like a charm straight out of the box. 4 times quicker than the old GeForce2 MX 200, (Which means a LOT! Think about it, 6 frames per second vs. 24 frames per second for the grotty benchmarks, more like 20 vs. 80 for actual gameplay!).
A lot of features. Full DirectX 8.1 support, which means the final picture looks nicer as well as faster.
Good drivers... I don't want to see another NVidia detenator release or guess which beta, pre-released copy will run the game I've got! So far the drivers off the CD are working fine, so why update them? (Catalyst 3.2)
And my personal fave - I was hitting crashes and hangs in many games... (I might be tempted to apologise to EA Games for slating Simcity 4, but they did say it would run on my old card). Now.... hyper smooth. Play a game... quit... surf.... play another game... ahhhhh deep sigh of relief!

The platform: Is a 1.2Ghz Athlon running on an ABIT KT7a motherboard. Not the fastest kid on the block, hence no point spending £200 on the latest fastest graphics card (I'll wait till it sells for around £50 again).

Drawbacks: There are many faster cards out there (for a price). It's possible I could have got a slightly faster card for the same price if I was an avid benchmark reader and wasn't fed up with NVidia driver choices.

End Result?: A happy gamer! They look nicer, play faster and don't crash! A significant increase in performance for not much dosh.
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br>Recommeded for: Budget gamers with tired video cards.

Pass it by: Frame rate lovers with fast CPU's and a large budget.

[Actually it's basically a Radeon 8500LE in a new box]
Price includes VAT but no P&P

Summary: