The Bottom Line
The Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro offers excellent performance for a budget price. Those who want high resolution with anti-aliasing and anisostopic filtering should look at higher priced cards.
Pros
- Good Overall 3D Performance
- DirectX 9 Support
- Excellent Overclocking
Cons
- AA and AF Causes Large Performance Drop
Description
- ATI RV350 (Radeon 9600 Pro) Graphics Processor w/400 MHz Core Clock
- 128 MB 2.8ns DDR Memory w/300 MHz Clock (600 MHz Effective)
- AGP 3.0 Interface (8x/4x)
- 4 Pixel Pipelines with 2 Texture Pipelines
- VGA, DVI and S-Video Monitor Interfaces
- Installation Drivers, Redline Overclocking Software, PowerDVD and Return to Castle Wolfenstein
- S-Video Cable
- S-Video to RCA Cable Adapter
- RCA Video Cable
- DVI to VGA Adapter
Guide Review - Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9600 Pro
6/22/03 – Sapphire has been well known for their early Radeon 9500 Pro cards that could be modified to perform like a Radeon 9700 Pro card. ATI is phasing out their Radeon 9500’s in favor of the low cost 9600’s, leaving Sapphire to produce the Atlantis 9600 Pro. The performance is slightly lower than the 9500s due to architectural changes, but that doesn’t make this any less of a value. 3D performance is excellent with this card. The only problem is with anti-aliasing and anisotopic filtering which reduces performance by roughly 40% when enabled. Those looking to overclock the board will not be disappointed. Clock and performance rates can be boosted as much as 30%. With its current market price, the Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro is a great buy.
