ATI RADEON 9700 PRO

Advantages Eats Alienwares for breakfast, boots in 15 seconds
Disadvantages Flimsy case, some fan noise (Radeon?)

...A victim of Alienware's ads, appealingly designed cases and smooth talking gamer oriented marketing I had spent months busily saving money away from an Area-51. I would frequently check the PC configurator to see how far my hard earned money would go. When the time finally came to buy I thought just for a laugh I'd check out what I could get from Dell for the same money - the joke turned out to be on me. I checked out Gateway and Compaq but for a gaming PC nothing even came close to the Dell. I had pictured myself trouncing foes with my fully powered Alienware - but for my budget of around £3,200 Alienware gave me a Pentium 4 - 2.53 Ghz, a CD-RW drive and the pre-requisite ATI Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card. The same budget at Dell got me a Dimension 4550 where I could trounce an Alienware owner spending the same amount. Instead... Read review

Advantages Superb Performance, excellent drivers
Disadvantages Quite expensive,

...I've just recently purchased one of these from a friend of mine, (I swapped it for the ATI Radeon 9700Pro that I'd had for two years) & I have to say, (after having ATI cards since I upgraded from my Dell Dimension 8100 about 2 years ago.) that I'm pleasantly surprised. For an Nvidia card (albeit running on the Leadtek variety of driver) the performance is pretty impressive, for instance; I have a copy of "bench-em-all" the benchmarking utility & although on the lower performance settings the card performs at the same level as my old 9700, as soon as you introduce the higher detail settings/ anti-aliasing/shader 2.0 etc. that the card absolutely blows the ATI's performance out of the water. Here are the default specs of the card: - NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra GPU CineFX II Engine Intellisample Technology HCT High... Read review

Advantages speed, reliability, ease of installation
Disadvantages i have had mine a year and havent found any yet

...about 12 months ago i decided to build myself a ''super computer'' i had picked my motherboard and my 3.06 gig pentium 4 with hyperthreading i had also picked my case. the one thing i wasnt sure about was graphics cards. i searched for reviews but none seem to crop up as much as the ati radeon 9700 pro, i read the reviews and still unsure i asked a few freinds who do know about em. they gave me the go ahead. i then looked for prices, back then i was looking at £300 - £350 i thought that was wayyyyyyy too much for a light user. i searched ebay and managed to get myself one imported for £250 (would have been £200 if damn customs hadnt discovered it). at last after tracking it from usa jfk airport to edinbourgh airport then down the country to me in the midlands uk, it finaly arrived, exited i installed it. absolutely no problems... Read review