ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB

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The lucky pal's at HotHardware took the DDR-II powered ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB for a spin. The 'built by ATI' board they have there comes with neat silver RAM heatsinks on 16MB DDR-II modules which are clocked at 700MHz (350MHz DDR) while the core stays at 380Mhz. Basically the advantage to have 256MB video memory is two fold: Like in Asherons Call 2 there may be games that let you run special texture settings while AA and AF settings can be run event at the highest resolutions with less performance penalties. [UT 2003] The 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro beat every other card, in every configuration except for one. At 1600x1200 without Antialiasing or Anisotropic Filtering enabled, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra managed to nudge past the Radeons, but that was it. The 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro showed it's largest lead over the 128MB model at 1600x1200 when 6X AA was enabled, where it posted a 9.7% higher frame rate. In most of the other configurations, the 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro's performance was about 3% - 5% higher. We were able to take our card all the way up to a core clock speed of 428MHz, with the memory clocked at 810MHz (405MHz DDR). That's a full 48MHz (12.7%) higher than the default core clock speed and 110MHz (15.7%) higher than the default memory speed! Note: Overclocking Results MAY NOT be typical of cards sold at retail.