Late last year, I took a look at a Radeon 9700 Pro from Sapphire. A power gamer’s card, the Sapphire
Atlantis 9700 Pro is the top of the line video card currently but it’s also one expensive purchase. Not all of us can spend $300 on a card to play games. To meet the demand for a value card, ATI has improved the Radeon 8500 and made it the 9100. Today we look at Sapphire’s version of the card, the
Radeon 9100 Atlantis..
The Sapphire
Radeon 9100 Atlantis is equipped with 128MB of DDR memory and features 4 rendering pipelines, 128bit memory bus, and clocked at 250MHz core speed with a 200MHz or 400DDR memory speed. The 128MB of DDR memory is comprised of eight 16MB memory chips rated at 5ns on both sides of the card by AData. As far as AGP specifications are concerned, the card supports up to AGP4X.
Compared to a Radeon 9700, the card has half the memory bus width and the memory speed is a quite a bit slower. With the 9700 Pro, the Radeon 9100 falls short in the same category along with being clocked slower. The clock on a 9700 Pro runs at 325MHz and the memory is at 310MHz or 620DDR. Price wise, the 9100 Pro runs around $80 and the 9700 Pro comes in at a $300.
Video output comes in three flavors: DVI, S-Video, and VGA. The card does support dual display utilizing Hydravision technology. Since I work with Hydravision at work, I can say that the implementation of dual display with it is pretty good. Rather than get into all the features that Hydravision has, I will just say that for dual monitor work the software does a great job.
Bundled with the card is just the driver CD and a Component to S-Video adapter. I would’ve liked to see a game or two thrown in there but seeing as this is a value card, they wanted to keep costs down.
My test system consisted of:
AMD XP 2400+
1024MB PC2100 Muskin High Perf. Memory 2-2-2
Windows XP w/ DirectX 9.0
MSI KT3 Ultra2 Motherboard
M-Audio Revolution 7.1
120GB WD 7200rpm 8MB cache
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