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by Crucial Technologies
Introduction Crucial is one of the largest suppliers of memory online, but few recognize them for their other products. Recently they have begun expanding their line of products by moving into the flash memory products and now with an expanded video card line. Originally they only sold the ATI based Radeon 9700 Pro video cards, but in early December they have added the 9200SE, 9200, 9600 Pro, 9800 Pro 128MB and 256MB. For this review, I will be examining the Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB. Specifications
Technically, there is very little difference between the Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB and 256MB versions. The 128MB uses DDR while the 256MB uses a more expensive DDR2 memory. This is the main reason for the $100+ difference between the two cards. Performance should be similar between the two with the 256MB version having slightly better performance in future games due to the extra memory and slightly faster memory speeds.  Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB Card The actual graphics card looks almost identical to the red PCB ATI Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card. About the only difference that I could find was the paper sticker with the Crucial logo affixed to the fan.  Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB Box Contents Package contents are very minimalist in terms of software but generous in terms of cabling and adapters. Included with the board are the following items:
It would be nice to see Crucial include some additional software to really showcase the power of this video card. There are a number of competitors that offer game bundles with their Radeon cards. Test Configuration Testing of the Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro was done on the following hardware and software:
Overclocking Much of the benefit of the ATI Radeon based cards is their generous overclocking ability. It should be noted that overclocking of any components will void any warranties provided by the manufacturer. This is particularly emphasized by Crucial due to the Lifetime Limited Warranty they offer. As such, users overclock their cards at their own risk. ATI has recently offered a dynamic overclocking feature to their latest Radeon 9800XT based cards, but this is still unavailable to owners of other Radeon cards such as the Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro. To properly test the overclocking ability of the card, I used the RadClocker utility. This is an application that adds a tab to the advanced video properties for adjusting the core and memory clock speeds. Using 3Mhz increments, I gradually increased the clock speeds until instability in the picture or system was produced in an Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark loop. It was then backed off slightly until consecutive stable runs without artifacts were produced. The final stable overclocking results I was able to generate were 429 MHz for the core clock speed and 363 MHz for the memory speed. This translates into a 13% increase for the graphics core and 6% increase for the memory. This is a decent overclock for the core, but somewhat of a disappointment for the video memory. The memory chips are rated at a 350MHz speed, so it is higher than their specification. All benchmarks were run at this overclocked speed for comparison. Benchmarking For testing of the graphics card performance, four benchmarks were used. Technology tests were conducted using the FutureMark 3DMark2001SE and 3DMark2003 (build 330) applications as well as AquaMark3. Since AquaMark3 is based upon the game engine behind the AquaNox 2 video game, it should be a decent test of graphics performance in current games. Additional gaming performance was tested using Unreal Tournament 2003. For a performance comparison, the scores were also taken from a Radeon 9600 Pro based card running in its stock configuration. This is used to demonstrate the performance difference between the mid-priced and performance Radeon graphics cards. 3DMark2001SE While FutureMark's 3DMark2001SE is a fairly old benchmark, it still is a valid benchmark for evaluating the performance of the video card in older games based around the DirectX 8.1 and lower standards. It was also based around the graphics engine used in the original Max Payne video game to give it some credibility. All tests were run at the default settings.
The most interesting numbers on this chart is the difference between the stock and overclocked performance for the overall 3DMark score. The difference between the two numbers is less than 3% indicating that the performance is more limited by the CPU than the graphics core. The multi-texture fill rate is very close to the theoretical specification value. The benchmark also shows that performance is about 50% higher than the 9600 Pro. 3DMark03 Many in the industry see FutureMark's 3DMark03 benchmark as a black eye. With the number of problems surrounding its development, allegations of cheating and a not so full implementation of DirectX 9, it is very hard to justify using it solely for performance feedback. I've included the overall score for completeness, but the real results of note are the fill rates and the pixel shader 2.0 scores.
It is interesting that 3DMark03 shows about 10% slower fill rates on the graphics card over the 2001SE version. The notable number here is the pixel shader 2.0 shows almost double the performance of the Radeon 9600 Pro card. Shader performance displayed a 10% performance increase from overclocking the card. AquaMark3 AquaMark3 is a fairly new benchmark provided by JoWood and Massive Entertainment that is based around the game engine for AquaNox 2. It uses a mix of DirectX 8.1 and DirectX 9 technologies through a series of tests to generating numbers for the graphics card, CPU, overall and a frame rate score. This is an accurate depiction of how the graphics card would perform in this game.
Based on the numbers, the Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro provides a very good average frame rate that is playable. This is a 50% improvement over the frame rate for the 9600 Pro. There are sections of the benchmark such as the high particle count and massive overdraw where the Radeon 9800 Pro still struggles to produce around 20 frames per second. Overclocking the 9800 Pro once again produced a 10% improvement in performance numbers. Unreal Tournament Unreal Tournament is one of the most widely played DirectX accelerated games currently available. This makes it an excellent platform for predicting the performance of graphics cards in real games versus synthetic benchmarks. For this test, I used the UT2k3 Benchmark Utility version 2.1 from HardOCP. All settings for the benchmark were set to high detail and run on the DM-Antalus flyby. The test was run at three resolutions levels with no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering and again with 4x AA and 8x AF settings. Reported frame rates are from the average frame rate scores: 
This chart and graphic really demonstrates the benefits of running a high-end graphics card over a budget minded graphics card. With anti-alias and anisotropic filters turned on, the performance levels of the Radeon 9800 Pro are higher than those produced by the 9600 Pro without any filtering turned on! The use of these filters provides a huge improvement on the quality of the graphics as well. The benchmark numbers were even at the playable frame rates for the 1600x1200 resolution, something the 9600 Pro cannot achieve at all. Overclocking provided a 10% boost in the frame rates over the standard 9800 Pro clock rates. Conclusions So does the Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB make a good graphics card for the PC enthusiast? The answer based on the all the benchmarks is a definitive yes. The card is able to produce an outstanding level of performance that allows higher quality features such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filters to be used. Performance levels are between 50% to 100% greater than the 9600 Pro that sells for half the amount. Based on these facts alone, those looking for great graphics quality and performance can't go wrong. There area few drawbacks to the Crucial 9800 Pro 128MB card though. Most notably is the price. The current price of the Crucial 9800 Pro board is roughly $50 more than the same card from ATI. Why the price difference? Crucial offers the Lifetime Limited Warranty with all their products. So those who value this level of commitment behind the quality of the components will value this. Of course, those looking to overclock the board will void this warranty, so would be better to look at a less expensive alternative. |
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