CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Excellent
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 01/24/2002
- Updated on: 01/08/2003
Seeing double
If you've ever felt short of desktop work (or play) space, the ATI's dual-monitor capability might be the answer to your problems. The card is equipped with both a standard 15-pin VGA connector and a DVI-I connector for digital flat-panel displays, and there is a DVI-to-VGA adapter for hooking up two VGA monitors simultaneously. Also, an S-Video-out port and cable let you connect the Radeon to a television so that you can use it as a monitor.
Installing the ATI is fast and easy thanks to the clear, thorough instructions; just slide the card into an AGP slot and install the software (sorry, no PCI option is available). Aside from the drivers for Windows 98, Me, 2000, NT 4.0, and XP, the software CD includes DVD-viewing software (useful if you have a DVD-ROM drive) and a multimedia-player application. A multimonitor utility called Hydravision lets you specify which monitor you want a new window to appear in or which you want an application to run in. But as with the Hercules 3D Prophet III Titanium 200, you won't find any bundled games.
The card's Radeon 7500 GPU gives the ATI impressive processing power--almost more than you need. For example, it supports a maximum resolution of 2,048x1,536 with a 75Hz refresh rate, but few people currently use such an astronomical setting. Besides, lowering the resolution to 1,280x1,024 boosts the refresh rate to 100Hz, and at 1,024x768, the refresh rate is an amazing 200Hz--almost entirely flicker-free and much easier on the eyes. The Radeon 7500 has 64MB of DDR memory, which is plenty for most uses--and the least you'd want for current games.
Trumped in testing
But ample memory wasn't enough. Though the Radeon 7500 offered adequate gaming performance, it was trumped at every turn in CNET Labs' performance tests when compared to the slightly more expensive Hercules 3D Prophet III Titanium 200. In the Quake III Arena test at a resolution of 1,600x1,200 with 32-bit color, the Radeon 7500 scored a poky 53 frames per second (fps) compared to the Prophet III Titanium 200's 70.5fps. Lowering the resolution to 1,024x768 boosted the ATI's output to a much better 115fps, but the Hercules still held the lead with 149fps. In MadOnion's 3DMark 2001 Pro and eTesting Labs' 3D WinBench tests, the ATI lagged behind the Hercules at all resolutions.
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