ATI Rage Fury Pro
When you go out shopping for a new video card you should ask yourself what do I really want? Depending on your needs you could either opt for a very fast card with great performance or you could opt for a card with average performance coupled with some cool features. Well if you are a real performance buff then the Rage Fury Pro won’t be the best choice for you, however if you fall into the other category then this card truly is one of the best in the market today. The Rage Fury Pro boasts of a range of multimedia features such as video capture, TV-out, hardware DVD acceleration and 3D features like 32-bit rendering, bump mapping, AGP texturing, texture compression. And the best part is you get all this for just around $107, now that sure is a great deal.
If you took a good look at the 3D Acceleration features this board includes then you’ll know that this is no ordinary board that come out into the market, and as our tests will show its performance isn’t that bad either.
It was with much anticipation I opened the package ATI sent me, and at first glance I was very impressed. The package included a software bundle which included NFS3 and HeavyGear II, and of course the ATI driver CD. The software bundle doesn’t come under my favorite top 10 list, nevertheless I know some of you might still like them. Keep in mind though this software bundle is bound to be revised constantly. The cables provided for the TV-out are of very high quality and the package includes one Composite cable and one S-video cable.
Getting back to the board!!! The board comes with quite a huge heat sink, but as with ATI’s past cards they haven’t attached a fan to it. Believe me the no oversized heat sink will do any good from heat produced when playing very demanding games. After playing NFS3 quite a few times the screen just freezed, evidence of inadequate cooling. So if you decide to get one of these boards make sure you go shopping for a fan as well.
The Rage Fury Pro comes with a core clock speed of 143/155MHz (Core/Ram). This is a significant improvement from their earlier Rage Pro 128 video card since it was clocked at a mere 100Mhz. It’s nice to see that ATI decided to compete with the high leagues such a Nvidia, 3dfx by reving up the clock speed of the Rage Fury Pro, and one point to ponder is that this card has the same clock speed as the TNT2 does. Whether this fact will make it perform equally as the TNT2 will be answered later in our tests, but for now it’s nice to know ATI is joining into the high-end market. To further enhance the capabilities of the board they further added 32 MB of 6ns SDRAM, which is really adequate to handle demanding video needs at least for now. Speaking of memory ATI has also increased the performance of 32 bit rendering in the Rage Fury Pro, which means that we can enjoy 32 bit true color while playing games or anything of the sort.
When you consider the overall board there really isn’t a significant difference between the Rage Fury pro and its earlier counterpart, other than the fact that the Pro has a much higher core clock speed. Some of you might think that the Rage 128 chipset is a very a basic chipset, well guess again, it in fact it is capable of supporting up to 32Mb of SDRAM, SGRAM as well as DDR SGRAM. (Double Data Rate). However whether ATI will make use of the full potential of this chipset will be quite doubtful, yet we can expect ATI to come out with something extra ordinary in the near future to replace this technology.
The card supports AGP 2X as well as 4X. If your motherboard doesn’t support AGP 4X, well no need to worry, the card will work fine. The only drawback is that you won’t be able to make full use of the cards AGP 4X transfer rates.
