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ATI Technologies 100-430061 Radeon DDR Mac Edition

ATI Technologies 100-430061 Radeon DDR Mac Edition

List Price: $229.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: After 3dfx, this is the card for PCI based Macs!
Review: I decided to get this card after 3dfx was bought up by nVidia and new drivers stopped becoming available for my Voodoo 5500, and while the Voodoo card was impressive, I can't help but wonder why I didn't go for the Radeon in the first place. The one thing the Voodoo 5500 had over this ATI card was more powerful FSAA (full screen anti-aliasing), undoubtedly an attractive feature in 3D games like Unreal. But in my opinion, this is a small price for continued support in the form of updated drivers from a company that by now has a long and stable history on the Macintosh platform. Not to mention that the ATI Radeon is SMOKIN'! Sure, its 32 MB sound merely half as much as the Voodoo 5500's gargantuan 64 MB of VRAM, but then the ATI sports double density RAM--and it shows. The performance of 3-D games is a good measure of how powerful a graphics card is, and after I had cranked up Unreal Tournament to 1024 x 768 resolution and still I still kept getting a buttersmooth framerate of 30, I gotta tell you, I was gaping at my screen and muttering "Omigosh." Who knows--I might even go a little higher ... remember, however, that the performance of even the most powerful graphics card is limited by the speed of your CPU, so going for a framerate of 60 at the highest resolution may be unrealistic on all but the fastest Macs. If gaming performance matters little to you, the card delivers no less in intense graphics applications like Illustrator and Photoshop, and while I am not currently using this feature, the ATI Radeon also lets you hook up a TV set or a flat-panel monitor to your Mac ... not to mention a camcorder via S-Video (all cables included--always a nice touch). And last but not least, the included drivers and systems software is stable--the 3dfx utilities caused me at least a few headaches and system instabilities in their time. I imagine if you have one of the newest G4's which come with the nVidia GeForce, you'll be quite happy with that, but otherwise the ATI Radeon is an excellent choice for graphics on the Macintosh.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: PCI Mac Radeon- The most powerful PCI 3-D card. Period.
Review: This is quite literally the most powerful PCI Graphics card available. There are no faster cards out there for the PCI interface. 32MB of DDR-RAM (running at an effective 333MHz), coupled with a 166MHz GPU, 3 texture pipelines, and the TCL (Transform Clipping and Lightning) Charisma Engine, make this a must for any gamer with a PCI-based G3 who wants to take gaming to new heights without shelling out [money] for a new G4. For best possible results, you need a B&W G3 with a 66MHz PCI slot. Unfortunately i have only a 33MHz PCI bus in my beige G3, but this thing still pumps frames like it's nothing. My 300MHz CPU is bottlenecking this beast! Here is my setup: 300MHz G3/300/1MB, 66MHz bus, 320MB PC66 RAM, 6GB HDD, 16x10x40 CD-RW, Zip Drive, and 3Mbps cable modem. And OS 9.1. Let me say that in UT with my old wimpy ATi Rage PRO MACH 64 2MB card, i got a "whopping" 6fps. When i popped in this card, first thing i noticed was the amazing image quality- its incredible. I hit a solid 30-40 fps- on my four year old machine! (This is 1024x768x32 all settings max sound on). I lose about .1-.5 fps on switching from 640x480 to 1024x768- on Quake III or UT! This is because the card is so fast, the CPU is sending it data relatively slowly, so the damn thing's not even being tested, much less saturated! I think I might buy a 533MHz G3 card to max out this system- unless i OC'd the bus to 83MHz- doable- but stupid. Kicks the ATi Radeon 7000 PCI's butt. Why? Although the 7000 has a 366MHz effective DDR-RAM speed and a 183MHz GPU, it has only 2 pixel pipelines, and has no TCL, an essential component that takes loads of work off your CPU. So essentially you add 166MHz to your CPU, and add 32MB of DDR-RAM to ur video card. Well sort of. Overall GREAT!


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