General Usage
Installation
Installing the 9500Pro into any system with an AGP socket is very easy despite the need to connect an additional power cable. Forgetting to connect the cable causes an error message to be displayed before you can even access the bios.
The ATI drivers work very well and are very easy to deploy. Windows XP copes very well even before the ATI Catalyst drivers are installed providing 2d functionality only. The only major downside of the ATI drivers is their size, 20Mb as opposed to nVidia's 8Mb. Providing you have access to the internet at reasonable speed this should be nothing more than annoying.
DVD Playback
In a word, faultless. The Radeon 9500 produced clear and very smooth images when playing back DVD's both directly from disc and from file. This performance was matched when playing back DivX, AVI and MPG files. Watching DVD's via a television screen using the s-video connection was easy to setup and of a very high standard. Using television and monitor simultaneously was possible and caused no visible performance degradation.
Gameplay
Although the benchmarks in this review were limited to 1024x768 resolution every game we tried was able to run at 1600x1200 without any major concern. UT2003 proved a little jerky at 1600x1200 with 4xAA, but with AA disabled was very playable.
Image quality is much the same as the 9700. Games like Grand Prix 4 produce stunning graphics which in my opinion look far more realistic via the Radeon than the Geforce engine.
After a few hours playing UT with the 9500 overclocked at 9700 speeds the computer re-booted a few times due to heat, but at stock gaming was possible without fault hour after hour.
