Cheap Radeon 9600 128MB DDR/DVI/TV (Electronics) Price

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Customer Reviews of Radeon 9600 128MB DDR/DVI/TV

HTPC dream card
Hey if your not a gamer but looking for a card that will <
>Play DVD's <
>Play HDTV <
>Play WMVHD <
>DirectX 9 support <
>with a DVI + VGA + SVideo output <
>This is it ! <
>Rock steady - hardware acceleration - pushes my LCD projector to 1268x768 for true 16:9 projection at a crystal clear resolution. <
> <
>Can I say more - for this price you wont get any better.

This Card Has an Electrical Problem
I have a P3 1GHz system. I found that it wouldn't run some of the 2003 games well. I suspected that it was the video card, and I was right. After installing this new card, all my games ran well.

I did a lot of research on video cards prior to this purchase. Basically, these days if you want to get a good video card for gaming, it must either be an ATI Radeon or Nvidia GeForce. There is simply no third competitor.

ATI and Nvidia both try to serve three different market segments: budget, mainstream and high-end. My research suggested that a budget card will probably not be a worth while upgrade. One reason is that the current budget cards either do not support DirectX 9.0 or are really too slow to effectively support it. Since I suspect that my PC is not fast enough justify a high-end card, I decided on a mainstream card. At the time of purchase, this card is the cheapest mainstream card I can find, so I bought it.

The reasons why I only gave it 4 stars are:
1. The card did not come with enough software to play DVDs on Win2000.
2. There is a component (a capacitor I think) on the card that is in the way of the card latch of the AGP slot of my computer. I had to remove the latch from my AGP slot in order to get the card in. That is a pretty lousy component layout.

(...)
Update
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I have discovered that this card has an electrical problem that causes the card to go into a bad state upon shut down, standby or hibernation. The result is that I can no longer shut down, standby or hibernate my computer without risking difficulties in rebooting later. I don't think it is just my card because I have seen others reporting it on the internet. The workaround is to yank the power cable from the computer after shutting down, standby or hibernating so that the current bleeds out of the card. This may take about 10 to 20 mins.

It is possible that this problem is a combination of the characteristics of my motherboard, the device driver for the card and the card. This means that you may not experience the same problem. However, if you do experience this problem it is probably easiest to get a different card. I am dropping the rating of this card from 4 stars to 3 stars. 3 stars because it works great when it does work, and it is still the best card for the price.

(...)
*Update 2
(...)
I reported the problem to the technical support of connect3d. Apparently, they outsource their tech support to some 3rd party company. Like most tech supports, they are useless.

The question you need to ask yourself is: Is the cheap price of this card worth the trouble of waiting at least 10 mins after your computer enters a low power state before you can use your computer again? It depends on your usage model. I think I can probably live with this.

I have wasted a lot of time understanding the problem of this card, and I have probably added 1/2 year worth of wear and tear on my computer experimenting with workarounds. This means that even if I were to keep this card, I will NOT be a repeat customer. I am dropping my rating for this card again to 2 stars because of all the frustrations it has given me.