PowerColor 9800SE

The PowerColor website (http://www.powercolor.com.tw) contains information for each of their video cards. The information isn’t especially deep and, in some cases, not completely accurate. When I visited the site two weeks ago, they still indicated that the Radeon 9800SE had eight pipelines. This however has been fixed now, so I guess more people than I noticed the error. While there is a link to a FAQ for the Radeon 9800SE, the FAQ actually is empty. Looking at the FAQs for the other Radeon 9800 cards, it is clear that they still haven’t had time to enter much useful information. Unfortunately, PowerColor also does not seem to have invested in hiring someone who can speak English when writing their FAQ:

“why my system could not working stable after the new vga card have install ?”
“why the tv-output could not work ?”
“why the speed so slow when playing DVD title ? my system should fast enough .”

I could go on with more examples. If you have a site in English, I think it is important to also make sure it is written in proper English, especially in a FAQ where you have customers go to find solutions to problems.

PowerColor has a full range of drivers available for their Radeon cards, but for some reason, they stopped updating them after Catalyst 3.10. The fact that ATI has released several new driver revisions since then and are up to Catalyst 4.4 doesn’t seem to matter for PowerColor.

The PowerColor 9800SE is a good mid-range card that offers a good balance between price and performance. I was a bit disappointed that I couldn’t turn on antialiasing and anisotropic filtering at higher resolutions, but at this price, you cannot get everything.

Pros:
+ Price
+ Good bundle
+ Good midrange performance
+ Excellent image quality

Cons:
- Cannot turn on image quality enhancing features at higher resolutions without a huge performance hit
- Do not turn to PowerColor’s website for drivers or help.

For its great price / performance ratio, I award the PowerColor 8 of 10 and a Bjorn3D Seal of Approval.