ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB

256MB. This is how much memory many laptops come with today. This is 128 times more memory than I had in my first PC, a 466SX from IBM. This also is 128 times more memory than my first 3D card had (the Rendition V1000). Finally, this is the amount of memory that ATI’s flagship, the Radeon 9800 256MB Pro, has.

Today I am taking a look at this beast and pitting it against its main rival, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra.

May I present the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro.

The 256MB version of the Radeon 9800 Pro isn’t that much different from the 128MB version. The card is a bit longer, and the memory chips have heatsinks on them to cool down the hot DDR-II memory.

There are heatsinks both on the front and on the back of the card.

The full specs of the ATI 9800 Pro can be found here at ATI. You can also read our introduction of the 9800, which was posted back in June. The main points of interest are:

The 256MB version uses DDR-II memory clocked at 10 MHz higher than the 128MB 9800 Pro’s DDR-I memory. However, according to some comments on the Web, the latency of the DDR-II memory is slightly higher which could negate the extra 10 MHz advantage.

Since I did get the board directly from ATI, I didn’t get the boxed version, but this is what you should expect in the box:

• The card
• CD with drivers, Hydravision, CD player, DVD player
• Molex 4 pin splitter
• SVHS cable
• Composite Video cable
• DVI=>VGA adapter.
• Manual

The card has DVI, VGA and Video-Out ports.