Review: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB

So, going over the performance, especially the performance drop graphs, shows us two main things. First, 256MB is useless at the current time. It just smacks of reactionary one upmanship to keep toe to toe with NVIDIA with their completely useless 256MB board. While I applaud the technology needed, it's just a tad silly and very expensive. Let's just let NVIDIA and ATI fight it out up there and save our money for the 128MB boards just now.

Secondly, it highlights what a decent architecture R350 is. While the R300 in our graphs, 9700 Pro, isn't slow, 9800 Pro does some cool stuff to keep performance as high as possible when IQ is enabled and the resolution is pumped up.

Thirdly, it also helps to show us just what a performance bargain 9700 Pro is. In this reviewers eyes, it's the premier graphics accelerator on the market today. If every last frame per second is what you like, you'll laugh at me. For the rest of us that care more about IQ now that cards are fast with IQ features enabled, we'll stick to 9700 Pro due to its price.

As always, I love getting to sample the performance of boards like this. There's no doubting it's simply one of the fastest graphics cards ever produced, THE fastest in some situations (without the silly FX5900 Ultra, I'll reserve judgement totally). It's performance that the midrange will see next year, so be thankful ATI bothered to be silly.

Overclocking

I had to try, it would have been rude not to. The core was happy at 448MHz with a little assistance from a case fan and the memory clock purred along at 384MHz too. That's near 25GB/sec of memory bandwidth. Yum. Here's what that overclock did with an overclocked Barton under the bonnet.

20102 3DMark's

Overall

It's just too expensive to recommend, all that memory comes at a rather large price and it's just not being used in the vast majority of situations. The 128MB board is a much better proposition in terms of price/performance, with 9700 Pro being even better still.

It's very very fast, and for some people that's a must, they can't help themselves. And it's exciting technology, eventually there will be a valid consumer use for it too.

I never thought I'd call it overkill, but it certainly is just now.

Score