Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9600 Pro

Company: Sapphire
Product: Atlantis Radeon 9600 Pro
Street Price: ~$165
Date Reviewed:  June 17, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

Bundle and Features:

The rest of the bundle is very well put together. Included in the bundle are the necessary cables and connectors like the  DVI-to-VGA converter, S-VHS lead, S-VHS-to-composite converter, and composite lead. All the cables are important for using the DVI or TV-out functions provided by the video card.

The software bundle with the Sapphire 9600 Pro is very interesting. Of course you get the drivers CD but you also get Cyberlink's Power DVD which some of you may recognize from other video card bundles and/or motherboards. Another great software utility provided with the package is the Redline Overclocking/Tweak utility. This software makes is easy to overclock and tweak the video card. It is very similar to Rage3D Tweaker if you are familiar with that program.

Soldier of Fortune II is the main, attractive software that comes with the 9600 Pro. It is a first person shooter game that most people are familiar with. It is the full version and not just a demo. The game is very popular and can cost around ~$30USD. For a full review of the game, you can follow this link and see what TechTV had to say.

Overall the bundle is good. All the connectors are provided and the software is great. The enthusiast will be really happy to have the Redline tweak/overclocking software while the gamers will love having the full version of Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix. There is not really anything we could see adding to the bundle that would still keep the card in the mainstream price range.

Overclocking:

For the overclocking segment of our review, we decided we would go ahead and use the Redline software to overclock the card. As we said earlier, it is very similar to Rage3D Tweaker for those that are familiar with that program. We are used to using Rage3D, so overclocking the card was simple. First we started out overclocking the core, as always, we went in small increments to check for stability in-between speeds. We were able to get the core up to 506MHz. This is about a 27% overclock and to put it simply it's a good overclock.

The memory was a different story though. We expected to be able to reach around 340MHz on the memory and the box even says that the memory can do at least 330MHz. We were only able to get 324MHz. Interesting thing is that we were not getting artifacts but hard lockups, which would normally sound like the core giving us problems but we were only overclocking the memory at the time. Perhaps it was just our particular card or the overclocking software not functioning properly. Even still at 506/324 the card performed much better than at stock speeds. 3DMarks 2001 SE build 330 showed a 1730 point increase which comes up to a 14% increase in performance.

Even though the memory did not overclock as well as we expected, we are still impressed with the overclocking ability of the Sapphire 9600 Pro. We did not run more benchmarks to show how much more performance was gained from the overclocked card but you can bet at 506/324 the performance is much better than at the stock speeds of 400/300. Apparently the 9600 Pro card, not just Sapphire's version, are all good overclockers and can do the high 400's on the core speed. Nice job by ATi and Sapphire.