VGA Card Buyer's Guide 07/2003

Gigabyte Radeon 9800 PRO 128 MB (GV-R98P128D), Continued

The rich game bundle consists of the slightly outdated games "Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2" (August 02), "Need For Speed - High Stakes" (March 99), "Motocross Mania" (2000), "Serious Sam The First Encounter" (March 01) and 'lite' versions of the games "4x4 Evo" and "Oni." The card comes with Cyberlink's PowerDVD XP 4.0 for DVD rendering.

In addition to card drivers and ATi 3D demos, the installation CD also includes Gigabyte's own V-Tuner software that you can use, for example, to adjust the chip and memory clock speeds. However, the CD version does not run with ATi's current CATALYST driver, so you have to download the latest version from the Gigabyte homepage. The program can be launched from an icon in the task bar.

The 32-page manual provides decent support for the installation of the card, but causes a bit of confusion because of the outdated ATi driver menus it depicts.

Conclusion: The Gigabyte Radeon 9800PRO is a reliable card, but without any striking visual or technical features. If you are looking for a reliable Radeon 9800 Pro card, you can't go wrong with the Gigabyte board. Though the card comes bundled with a lot of games, the selected titles are very outdated and can't exploit the potential of the DirectX 9 card.

+ DVD Player software
+ TV-out
+ Video cable for composite & S-VHS
+ Rich game bundle
+ DVI display up to 1600x1200

- Game bundle extremely outdated
- Very noticeable fan noise