ATI RADEON 9800PRO graphic accelerator card - August 2003 BACK
My friend called me from Malacca end of July 2003 when I was still in Sibu. He wanted to upgrade a graphic card and was in total admiration of the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. 9800 Pro is a slight improvement from the 9700 Pro (which was the master of her time) but the one he asked me to buy was the 128MB type. The 256MB was out already by the time I bought him the card around early August 2003. It was far more expensive but surely the performance will definitely be better, although claimed not to be too much. This baby costs around S$760 at that time.
I tested drive this baby on my computer, took out my almost 2 years old GeForce 3 Titanium500. There is a comparison below how much bigger and solid this card is compared to the GF3Ti. Radeon 9800 Pro like the 9700 Pro are both running on AGP8X. This card also follows Radeon 9700 Pro in the way that it requires power supply from the hard disk/cd/dvd-rom cable direct from the power supply unit. Anyway, I set it down to AGP4X because my motherboard don't support AGP8X and started going through the demos. She went through all demos with ease, bring out the beauty of light, texture, shade, colour and smoothness of surfaces - realistic enough to simulate whatever thhey are representing. I don't bring much games to S'pore so I only tested FIFA2003 and Championship Manager 4 on it.
I bring her through Adobe Photoshop 7.0, as well as AutoCAD 2004, Microstation v8.1, Form Z, Revit 5.0, 3D Viz, 3D Studio max and try to push her off the limits. She performs damn fast and I am very impressed with her capabilities. Overall, I am pretty satisfied with her ability and tell my friend he will love it very much when I bring her to Malacca for a visit. Indeed, after reaching Malacca, we inserted her into his computer and she did not disappoint at all! ATI RULES!
