Strengths: Great 2D,Nice Fluid 3D graphics on most Games.
Weakness: Newer Games Cause For Slow down in Graphics,Drivers pretty much Are'nt worth it.
A Great card, From a Kind of Iffy Company. The Drivers are never the best with Ati cards, They all ways Release just one kind, and Sadly this Kind where the same ones the 7200 uses. A great card If u want to be experimenting half the time with games, and different settings to get games to look right and work right. Probably the Worst thing, is The 7000 and up line of cards came out shortly after this one did, Which is sinking your own boat I say. U can find a 7500 DDr card for bout the same price U can this one. Which is really bad.
So yes Buy it if u need a good reliable card out of the box. But Watch out for updated drivers off the site, Ati has never had a good record of Support.
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TopStrengths: Fast, stable, almost as versatile as an All-In-Wonder
Weakness: Several generations old...
Though old, this card can definately hold its own against newer low-end products. The VIVO capability is very handy and gets more use than I thought it would. I'm getting "ATI" tattooed on my left butt cheek next Thursday.
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TopStrengths: good quality looks and speeds while playing most games
Weakness: drivers and gama settings depending on drivers you use
Very nice card over all i've enjoyed owning it and plan on picking up the 8500dv shortly.
drivers do need to be improved when playing 3d games (asherons call underground and thief II)they are almost always too dark and hard to play unless you play with the color settings to increase the brightness and play with diffrent versions of drivers. I've had to downgrade the drivers i've used to be able to get the brightnesses to stay where they should or when you run the game it will reset the gama settings and be too dark to play. hopefully soon they will improve the drivers again and not make a general one made for more than one card as with the 7200 and this card.
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TopStrengths: Polygons out the yahoo! Tv out for putting display on your TV. Great 3D gaming card. Graet software bundle
Weakness: When enabling TV display sometimes monitor and TV wont sync. When viewing on a NON digital TV hard to read text icons. Sometimes has purple hue instead of black. Customer support is slow, Email
I have had this card for almost a year and have displayed movies from my windows media player or Kazaa or the DVD on the TV and it was EXCELLENT! This card was made for gammers who want the fastest 3D rendering in the market, This produst is the best i have found for the money and i am sure you will benifit from it also. It just kicks butt!
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TopStrengths: Inexpenisve, DDR
Weakness: Poor Drivers, low FR's at new games
The Radeon 64mb DDR is a fair graphics card, to say the least. It has substantial graphics power and memory and clock speeds. However the drivers for it are god awful. ATI is really lowering the performance of their cards due to weak drivers. Go to www.anandtech.com and see how Nvidia always out frames ATI. Yes, the GeForce3 is better than the ATI Radeon 8500, in almost every game at every resolution. Do yourself a favor and buy a GeForce3 Ti200 instead, there is only a $20 difference, but the difference in performance is huge.
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TopStrengths: -Great 2D quality in windows, high RAMDAC -Incredidle speed in games -DVD decoding built in
Weakness: -Tricky to get going perfectly
The ATI radeon 64Mb ViVo is the best video card I have ever owned. The speed in 3D games beat out the GeForce 2 it replaced and with new drivers it keeps getting faster. It is the SE 200Mhz model so game performance is even better then usual. The 2D quality in windows and the quality of its 3D reproductions is crisp, and fast and fluid. Built in DVD decoding is far better then anything that nVidia's motion compensation can do, it comes close to the quality of a PCI hardware decoder. The ViVo functions are good, but there software is a little buggy, but it hasnt crashed in a while, and the drivers are trickier to set up then with some other 3D cards. Overal its been great, I highly recommend
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Top
ATI RADEON Graphics Card
Strengths: Video In and Video Out is great. Buy a cord for the sound and you have an effective way of making tapes off your computer. Video games are great if you don't want to go overkill on the resolution
Weakness: A few issues with XP. Remember, when I'm writing this XP is fairly new so the kinks have to be worked out as well.
This card is great. I have no problems with it. But since I have very little experience with video cards I can't really say alot about experience. I like this card as far as being able to watch things I've downloaded on my TV, but I also like playing games on my TV if I had a bigger TV. The card runs smoothly on my 1200x1024 (whatever it is) resolution. The video out is great and the video in is great for the projects as well. You can also use it to watch TV but not as well as a All in wonder can. For the price it's great! I suggest it to anyone who is serious about gaming and multi-media applications, but isn't hardcore about it. The video in is handy for those video projects and wish I had this card when I was in high school.
Gaming it's great for as well. I haven't had 1 problem yet. However, if you do try to turn on the best of the best of the video modes of the game (Max Resolution, Smoke/shadow effects, Trilinear... although it does work well just the resolution is the one that will get ya) you will experience slow down. But that is to be expected of any program where you try to squeeze the best out of it.
Although, I must say. ATI does bite for support. But for the extra features you get, any NVIDA can't hold a light to it.
Summed up:
Good for gaming, Good price, good features. GEFORCE vs. ATI, both are good but GEFOrce doesn't have as many cool features that are supported that ATI develops and supports.
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