Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800SE

Company: Sapphire
Product: Atlantis Radeon 9800SE
Street Price: $180 USD
Date Reviewed: December 22, 2003
Reviewer: Joey Chao

The Good:

Sapphire has done a great job with the 9800SE. The card has some decent performance and can possibly be soft modded to use all 8 pipelines, which would make it very close to a 9800 Pro minus the 256-bit memory bus. The bundle provides all of the extra gear users will need to take full advantage of the card. Sapphire also goes the extra mile by bundling overclocking software, PowerDVD, and a full version of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. It is not often that you will find a package so feature rich.

The Sapphire site has forums where users can go if they need some help troubleshooting as well as a page with downloads for the latest ATi drivers. If a serious problem occurs with the card, consumers may contact Sapphire directly and all the necessary information is found on this page.

The Bad:

The Atlantis 9800SE does not come cheap considering the performance obtained. You can get a 9600 Pro, which will perform better for less than the cost of the 9800SE. If the software bundle is taken into consideration, you can say that the card is fairly priced, although some might argue differently. In terms of raw performance, the card will play most games, but will not play well with the highest quality settings at high resolutions.

The main consideration in buying this card will be how much consumers like the software bundle and what type of computing they do. If you are a heavy gamer and love eye candy, you might want to look else where. If you just need a card that can handle most of today's games but don't care for anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering, then the 9800SE from Sapphire will do the job nicely.

If you would like to make any comments, feel free to post in this thread.

Overall: 8/10