A full cable kit includes an S-Video cable, a composite video cable, a component video adapter, a composite video adapter, a DVI-I to VGA adapter and a four-pin power splitter. The power splitter is especially useful in any system that lacks an unused floppy-style power connector.

The Upgrade Process

We dug deep into the PC graveyard and pulled out a three-year-old upper-midrange system to simulate a typical upgrade scenario. ATI's 128 MB Radeon 9600 Pro had the same price in May 2003 as that of the Diamond Viper X1600 AGP 512 MB in May 2006. Following our own advice, we first upgraded to 2 GB DDR-SDRAM, clocked at the standard 400 MHz at DDR speed and dual channel mode for a synchronous transfer rate, and to the Pentium 4 2.6 GHz processor.

The normal procedure for upgrading a graphics card includes uninstalling the old drivers, removing the old graphics card, installing the new graphics card and installing the new drivers. We tried another method, simply updating the 9600 Pro to the latest ATI Catalyst version then replacing it with the X1600 Pro. This second method worked just as well for our applications, but the first method is generally recommended to reduce the risk of configuration errors. After experimenting with various installation methods and finding them all working, we reinstalled the system to get a clean start at benchmarks.

Test Setup