ATI RADEON® 9800 Pro, (128 MB) AGP Video Card

Two or was it three years ago, this card was the best you could get - if you could afford £300 that is. And not surprisingly, it's still no slouch even today.

There are a lot of benchmarks to run, but I usually just rely on my own eyesight for whether a graphics card is any good or not, especially in games. I do run the old 3DMark 2001 SE benchmark on most cards too, because I can relate quickly to previous cards I've owned, and I also have in the back of my mind an old article which stated (correctly) that for a game to be playable, it should achieve at least 6000 3D Marks.

The old Radeon 9800 runs rings round any modern day budget graphics card like the Nvidia 6200, which is barely faster than the very inadequate FX 5200 it replaced. Pitched against any sub £50 modern card, it would come out on top - easily, and even against a lot of dearer cards.

I'll put some numbers to that.... The Nvidia FX 5200 barely crawls above 3000 3D marks and the 6200 gets about 4 or 500 more 3D marks. This is not knocking Nvidia as ATI's budget range is just as bad, if not worse. I prefer the better Nvidia cards actually, but my budget wouldn't stretch to one.

So what did the old warrior, the 9800 score? Well it's a BIG improvement at 14, 000 3D Marks and a more real world test was running one of my favourite games C&C Generals. When first installed, it will default to whatever graphics resolution it thinks the system can handle and with an FX 5200 or 6200 graphics card, it will default to low graphics and still run like a slug.

With the 9800 installed, it immediately switched to high graphics and was very smooth and playable - fantastic :o) I can't see the new C&C 'Tiberian Wars' being a problem for it either, as I've already played it on another machine with an Nvidia 6200 turbocache crappy budget card in it.

It will have problems with some modern games, but as a replacement for a budget AGP card, it's a fantastic buy at an average price of around £20 on Ebay