Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9600 Pro

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

Conclusions & Final Thoughts:

Price and Features - 9
The Sapphire Atlantis 9600 Pro is a nice mainstream card. The price is competitive with other cards based on the same graphics chipset. The deciding point for someone to purchase this card would be the excellent bundle with the tweaking/overclocking software and the full version of Soldier of Fortune II. Also another important features is the DirectX 9 support. Looking at Newegg's prices for 9600 Pro's, the Sapphire 9600 Pro is actually a little bit cheaper than ATi's version. The card is a good buy for average users and low level enthusiasts.

Performance - 9
Performance wise, the card performs right on par with the other 9600 Pro we had for testing. In every benchmark the scores are very close. Comparing the card to other graphics chipsets is not really a fair comparison but it does show respectively how the cards perform. If you already have a 9500 Pro then you should just stick with your card. For those with a slower card like the GeForce TI 4200 will like the extra performance increase with the 9600 pro with the extra benefits like DirectX 9 support.

Stability - 10
Throughout the course of the review, we never once encountered an issue with the card. There were no problems with any of the benchmarks we used at any resolutions. The 3.4 drivers worked great with the card and the quality games looked superb. Not much to say except it was 100% stable.

Support - 10
Support for this video card is very good. Users can go to Sapphire's site and download the latest drivers and/or find out more information on a certain product. There is a contacts page with the e-mail address to departments all over the world for further information that cannot be found on the site. The last really good support option with Sapphire is their online forums. There many users can come and post questions or help our other solve their problems.

Overclocking - 8
Overclocking was good with this card. We were able to get 506/324 but the memory could have gone a little higher. We are not completely sure what the problem was with the memory overclocking. The Samsung modules are high quality, so perhaps it was an issue with our testing machine or maybe we just had the one unlucky card. Either way the performance of the overclocked card is definitely something to think about if you are on a tight budget but want the extra performance that can be gained from overclocking.

Overall - 9.2
It was a pleasure working with the Sapphire Atlantis 9600 Pro card. This is not the fastest video card out on the market but it is definitely worth thinking about if you are upgrading from a slower card but do not want to spend a lot of cash. We really like to see that Sapphire is looking out for the enthusiast with the overclocking software but not forgetting about the mainstream users that just like the nice bundle with games and general performance. We also have the Sapphire Atlantis 9800 Pro and that review will be released shortly.