Spanky the Wonder Card

I was sick of my FX 5200 so being the cheap ass that I am, I picked up a Radeon 9600SE for $75CAN. I found that I could push the core from 325mHz to 460mHz by screwinhg an old socket 7 fan to it. I also knocked the memory from 400mHz DDR to 450mHz. There's no artifacts or instability.

Although the card only scores ~7200 in 3DMark 2001SE in my XP 2800+/1GB RAM, the gaming performance is flawless. I'm getting absolutely no slowdowns in Halo on max settings 1024x768, HL2 max settings 1024x768 and very minimal slowdowns in Doom III on high, 800x600. I find this to be incredible value for $75...

So yeah, if you need a good card on a budget, the 9600SE may be your card. Mine's a Powercolor.

Lol it's not like you could buy that retail anymore, anyways

Glad you're happy with it, but you could have scored much better cards for the money.

the 9600SE has a crippled 64-bit memory bus, a 9550 with a 128-bit bus would have proven much faster for the cash.

Better yet, a used 9700 PRO on ebay would have been about the same price, and would have scored you +10,000 in 3dMark 2001SE...