Crucial RADEON 9800 Pro 256MB

One of the first memory upgrades I ever bought was a Crucial Technologies PC100 DIMM a few years ago. Well, a lot has changed in the memory industry and at Crucial since that time, when Crucial only sold Micron memory modules. Now, we have DDR memory modules rated above PC4000 (the rating system also changed!), and Crucial sells much more than just memory. Since it is a division of Micron, Crucial still only sells Micron memory, but it also sells other products from software to video cards. I did not even know until recently that Crucial expanded its product offerings. I would guess it was due to the continual pressure on the margins in the memory industry that caused them to need more sources of income to stay afloat. But, that's just speculation, and not what this review is about.

Crucial was generous enough to supply us with their current flagship video card, their RADEON 9800 Pro 256MB. Crucial opted to use DDR2 on this board to squeeze all the performance possible out of it, but that usually also raises the price. We'll look at the price later. Now, let's check out this baby's specs and see how it performs.

Specifications:

• Powered by the RADEON 9800 Pro VPU, driven by eight-pixel pipeline rendering architecture
• 256-bit DDR2 memory interface, featuring HYPER Z III+ bandwidth-conserving technology
• 256 MB DDR2 SDRAM memory
• 400 MHz RAMDAC
• AGP 8X/4X compatible
• VGA connector, TV-out connector, DVI-I
• Fully supports Microsoft DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 2.0
• Dual display support

It is well worth noting that every Crucial video card comes with a limited lifetime warranty and free technical support. That can help make you a feel a little bit better about throwing down a large chunk of change for all that memory and graphics processing power. Check out the product website for more details about the board's features.

Front of the Box

Back of the Box

The Nice Red PCB and Heat Sinks Galore!

A Closer Look at the Cooling Hardware

You can see that keeping the memory cool was a priority here. There are eight more chips on back, and each of those is identical, including the heatsink, to the ones you see on the front. Even with all this metal on the card, it is fairly slim and will easily fit in one slot.

Package Contents:

• Installation CD:
  • Drivers
  • HydraVision (for multi-monitor support and desktop management)
  • Crucial Overclocking Utility
  • Intervideo WinDVD
• User's Manual
• Composite Video Cable
• S-Video Cable
• RCA-to-S-Video Adapter
• DVI-to-VGA Adapter

Plug and Play!

Some Light Reading and Some Software