Introduction
The graphics card industry has developed leaps and bounds over the past few years. To cut a long story short, the only major players currently in the market are ATI and NVIDIA, with some one time big players such as Matrox still around in some form.
The PowerColor ATI 9800 graphics card supplied by Komplett is designed as a top of the range graphics card, only surpassed by its siblings (the 9800 Pro and 9800 XT respectively).
ATI 9800 Graphics Card
The 9800 series cards from ATI are based on the new R350 chipset, a higher clocked and tweaked R300 core. The R300 was used to much sucess in the 9700 series cards. The ATI 9800 card is exactly the same as a 9800 Pro card, except for a difference in clock speeds.
Included Items
Everything you need to get up and running is included, as well as cables for connecting the card to items such as TVs. It was good to see that PowerColor have supplied a small games bundle and a demo CD, but disappointing that the full versions are all 2001-era games, which don't take advantage of the card's full capabilities.
Features
The 9800 series cards have several improvements in features over their 9700 series predecessors, some of which can yield some substantial performance differences:
SmartShader 2.1
This revised shader support in the 9800 series cards supports limitless pixel shaders. This improvement over the 9700 is due to the new F-buffer, short for “Fragment-stream FIFO buffer”.
SmoothVision 2.1
This is ATI's wording for AntiAliasing and Anisotropic Filtering image enhancements, which can greatly increase gaming quality by removing jagged edges and faded textures. The maximums of 6x FSAA and 16x AF are the same as the 9700 series, but the memory controller has been tweaked slightly to give better performance with these features enabled.
Hyper ZIII +
The Hyper Z technology refers to ATI's in core optimisations to save rendering cycles. This revision features an enhanced Z-Cache which greatly improves stencil buffer rendering times, greatly improving complex shadows in games.
Card Layout:
Front Layout
Rear Layout
This particular card came with 3.3ns Samsung memory chips onboard, which corresponds to about 300Mhz. The memory is currently running at 290Mhz, so very little room is left for overclocking. Some cards have been fortunate enough to ship with 2.8ns or 3.0ns memory chips, which would allow for much more overclocking potential.
Installation
As with most graphics cards, the PowerColor card is extremely easy to install. Once the graphics card is clicked into the AGP slot, just connect the Molex power connector and boot the PC up. Not connecting the power connector by accident will not damage your PC, but it won't work properly without it connected.
The drive CD does contain some 'Catalyst' drivers for ATI cards for all major operating systems, but it is always best to download the latest ones from ATIs website to get the best performance and minimum bugs from your games.
Performance
The performance of the PowerColor 9800 should be almost exactly the same as any other 9800 board available, as they are all based closely to the ATI reference board.
The system setup used to benchmark the graphics card is what should be a fairly average system, which should compare favourably to most users systems thinking of purchasing this card:
Intel Pentium 2.4B P4 CPU
512 DDR 333 Ram
PowerColor 9800 128MB
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
NVidia GeForce Ti4600
Maxtor 200GB SATA Diamond Max Plus 9
Gigabyte 8IEXP Motherboard
Quake 3 is one of the 'standards' in graphics benchmarking, although it is now starting to show its age. Surprisingly, the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro outpaces the 9800 in all resolutions, but only by a small amount. This is no doubt due to the higher clock speed, even on the older R300 core. The 9800 Pro can be expected to be faster than all of these cards again, due to the core and memory speed improvements. Not surprisingly, the older Ti4600 is lagging - even though it was the top performer only months ago.
Unreal Tournament 2003 is a more recent game, which should show the performance increase from older cards in most modern games. The results show a considerably similar picture to that of the Quake 3 results - with the 9700 Pro taking the lead by a couple of percent once again. Both the ATI cards perform well at all resolutions, with the previous generation Ti4600 performing at a reasonable level at the lower resolutions.
Performance
After using the PowerColor 9800 for several weeks, in place of an old NVidia GeForce 4 MX440 and Ti4600, the difference can really be noticed. The benchmarks on the previous page do not show the full scale of difference that the 9800 offers, which would be true of any next generation graphics card over its predecessor.
One of the main differences between the 9800 (and even 9700 and GeForce FX) series cards over older graphics cards from the past year, is that they are fully DX9 compliant. This will make a huge difference when games are released in the coming months, as they will quite simply look a lot better with these advanced rendering features.
The best example showing this improvement is in 3DMark 2003, which although can give controversial benchmarking results, does demonstrate DX9 graphics capabilities extremely well. Older cards, which although top of the range last year (such as the Ti4600 and 8500 series), will simply not give you the best looking graphics available - even though they may run at a faster FPS (which is still unlikely).
A crucial game which many gamers will want to be able to play at high detail is Half Life 2, which will be highly optimised for DX9. As this game takes full advantage of the latest pixel shader technologies, older DX8.1 graphics cards would have to run this game without many of the stunning effects visible in game.
In relation to 2D performance, this card is on a par with any of the latest high end graphics cards. Any specialised 2D work, or special monitor set-ups may require an alternative graphics solution from another manufacturer, as this is primarily designed as a high end gamers card.
Conclusion
Although the 9800 card (and in fact the whole 9800 series in general) has been available for a few months, there is no card which can truly rival the 9800 series in performance. The top of the range variant in the 9800 series, the 9800 XT should perform reasonably faster in games, followed by the Pro variant - both of these cards have the same extensive feature set. There is also a 'lite' version of the 9800 graphics card, the 9800SE, which has the same feature set but only half the number of rendering pipelines.
The 9800 has proven its worth many times as an excellent graphics solution for gamers, and this PowerColor braded board is no different. This board retails for around £30-50 less than some Pro variants of the board, which makes this an excellent buy for those users wanted the latest features with excellent performance, but wish to save a little more money. This is a very complete package that can provide a top-notch gaming solution, even if the games bundle is a little lacking.
The graphics card industry has developed leaps and bounds over the past few years. To cut a long story short, the only major players currently in the market are ATI and NVIDIA, with some one time big players such as Matrox still around in some form.
The PowerColor ATI 9800 graphics card supplied by Komplett is designed as a top of the range graphics card, only surpassed by its siblings (the 9800 Pro and 9800 XT respectively).
ATI 9800 Graphics Card
The 9800 series cards from ATI are based on the new R350 chipset, a higher clocked and tweaked R300 core. The R300 was used to much sucess in the 9700 series cards. The ATI 9800 card is exactly the same as a 9800 Pro card, except for a difference in clock speeds.
Specifications
- ATI 9800 Series Core
- 325Mhz Core Clock Frequency
- 128 Meg 290Mhz DDR Memory
- Eight Parallel rendering pipelines
- AGP 8x Support
- SmartShader 2.1, Smoothvision 2.1, HyperZ III+, TruForm 2.0, VideoShader, FullStream Technologies
- Fully supports DX9.0 and OpenGL feature sets
Included Items
- ATI 9800 Graphics Card
- User Manual
- Software CD
- Game Demo CD
- Comanche 4
- Summoner
- WinDVD
- S-Video Cable
- Composite Video Cable
- S-Video > Composite Adapter
- Power Cable
Everything you need to get up and running is included, as well as cables for connecting the card to items such as TVs. It was good to see that PowerColor have supplied a small games bundle and a demo CD, but disappointing that the full versions are all 2001-era games, which don't take advantage of the card's full capabilities.
Features
The 9800 series cards have several improvements in features over their 9700 series predecessors, some of which can yield some substantial performance differences:
SmartShader 2.1
This revised shader support in the 9800 series cards supports limitless pixel shaders. This improvement over the 9700 is due to the new F-buffer, short for “Fragment-stream FIFO buffer”.
SmoothVision 2.1
This is ATI's wording for AntiAliasing and Anisotropic Filtering image enhancements, which can greatly increase gaming quality by removing jagged edges and faded textures. The maximums of 6x FSAA and 16x AF are the same as the 9700 series, but the memory controller has been tweaked slightly to give better performance with these features enabled.
Hyper ZIII +
The Hyper Z technology refers to ATI's in core optimisations to save rendering cycles. This revision features an enhanced Z-Cache which greatly improves stencil buffer rendering times, greatly improving complex shadows in games.
Card Layout:
Front Layout
Rear Layout
This particular card came with 3.3ns Samsung memory chips onboard, which corresponds to about 300Mhz. The memory is currently running at 290Mhz, so very little room is left for overclocking. Some cards have been fortunate enough to ship with 2.8ns or 3.0ns memory chips, which would allow for much more overclocking potential.
Installation
As with most graphics cards, the PowerColor card is extremely easy to install. Once the graphics card is clicked into the AGP slot, just connect the Molex power connector and boot the PC up. Not connecting the power connector by accident will not damage your PC, but it won't work properly without it connected.
The drive CD does contain some 'Catalyst' drivers for ATI cards for all major operating systems, but it is always best to download the latest ones from ATIs website to get the best performance and minimum bugs from your games.
Performance
The performance of the PowerColor 9800 should be almost exactly the same as any other 9800 board available, as they are all based closely to the ATI reference board.
The system setup used to benchmark the graphics card is what should be a fairly average system, which should compare favourably to most users systems thinking of purchasing this card:
Intel Pentium 2.4B P4 CPU
512 DDR 333 Ram
PowerColor 9800 128MB
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
NVidia GeForce Ti4600
Maxtor 200GB SATA Diamond Max Plus 9
Gigabyte 8IEXP Motherboard
Quake 3 is one of the 'standards' in graphics benchmarking, although it is now starting to show its age. Surprisingly, the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro outpaces the 9800 in all resolutions, but only by a small amount. This is no doubt due to the higher clock speed, even on the older R300 core. The 9800 Pro can be expected to be faster than all of these cards again, due to the core and memory speed improvements. Not surprisingly, the older Ti4600 is lagging - even though it was the top performer only months ago.
Unreal Tournament 2003 is a more recent game, which should show the performance increase from older cards in most modern games. The results show a considerably similar picture to that of the Quake 3 results - with the 9700 Pro taking the lead by a couple of percent once again. Both the ATI cards perform well at all resolutions, with the previous generation Ti4600 performing at a reasonable level at the lower resolutions.
Performance
After using the PowerColor 9800 for several weeks, in place of an old NVidia GeForce 4 MX440 and Ti4600, the difference can really be noticed. The benchmarks on the previous page do not show the full scale of difference that the 9800 offers, which would be true of any next generation graphics card over its predecessor.
One of the main differences between the 9800 (and even 9700 and GeForce FX) series cards over older graphics cards from the past year, is that they are fully DX9 compliant. This will make a huge difference when games are released in the coming months, as they will quite simply look a lot better with these advanced rendering features.
The best example showing this improvement is in 3DMark 2003, which although can give controversial benchmarking results, does demonstrate DX9 graphics capabilities extremely well. Older cards, which although top of the range last year (such as the Ti4600 and 8500 series), will simply not give you the best looking graphics available - even though they may run at a faster FPS (which is still unlikely).
A crucial game which many gamers will want to be able to play at high detail is Half Life 2, which will be highly optimised for DX9. As this game takes full advantage of the latest pixel shader technologies, older DX8.1 graphics cards would have to run this game without many of the stunning effects visible in game.
In relation to 2D performance, this card is on a par with any of the latest high end graphics cards. Any specialised 2D work, or special monitor set-ups may require an alternative graphics solution from another manufacturer, as this is primarily designed as a high end gamers card.
Conclusion
Although the 9800 card (and in fact the whole 9800 series in general) has been available for a few months, there is no card which can truly rival the 9800 series in performance. The top of the range variant in the 9800 series, the 9800 XT should perform reasonably faster in games, followed by the Pro variant - both of these cards have the same extensive feature set. There is also a 'lite' version of the 9800 graphics card, the 9800SE, which has the same feature set but only half the number of rendering pipelines.
The 9800 has proven its worth many times as an excellent graphics solution for gamers, and this PowerColor braded board is no different. This board retails for around £30-50 less than some Pro variants of the board, which makes this an excellent buy for those users wanted the latest features with excellent performance, but wish to save a little more money. This is a very complete package that can provide a top-notch gaming solution, even if the games bundle is a little lacking.
