Although this graphics card is under $100, O its outdated technology sells it short.
At the value end of ATI’s Radeon range ‘. X lies the 9250-ADT, based on the core technology of the 9200 series. The card has 128MB of DDR RAM, 240MHz internal clock, four hardware rendering pipelines (a maximum of four pixels per clock cycle) and uses a 4x/8x AGP bus. Other features include VGA, DVI and S-Video outputs, support for Microsoft DirectX 8.1 and inbuilt MPEG-2 hardware decoding.
ABIT has bundled the Radeon 9250-ADT with CyberLink PowerDVD 5.0 and an S-Video-to-RCA converter cable, and its implementation will fit into a standard desktop chassis, but not a small form factor case. Cooling is provided by a large heatsink.
The card was tested using 3DMark2001 SE, plus Halo and Doom 3 timedemos set to 1,024 x 768, low detail and no filtering for some real-life gaming feedback. The test platform was a 3GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB PC3200 RAM and an Intel 865G/ICH5 motherboard. The latest ATI Catalyst drivers (version 4.12) were also used.
Looking at the benchmarks, it’s clear that this card offers little in the way of performance, scoring 5,312 in 3DMark2001 SE, with gaming at unplayable framerates of 13.37fps (Halo) and 7.2fps (Doom 3).
This is mainly due to the limits of the legacy core technology. The 9200 series was obsolete well over 18 months ago, and the 9250 represents a bid to squeeze the last out of this graphics engine. It simply can’t process the volume of pixels required by today’s high-detail games, even at low resolutions with visual filters disabled. The card does support ATI’s filtering technologies — Charisma Engine II, HyperZ II, SmartShader and Smoothvision — but is incapable of utilising them without serious performance lags.
The 9250-ADT comes into its own in a low-power PC without an onboard video adaptor. With its ability to drive multiple displays and support legacy games with minimal 3D requirements, it might be a viable upgrade from very old systems like TNT2 or RAGE. It’s better suited to a system producing only 2D outputs with single or multiple monitors, or even a Media Center-based machine, given the outputs and software bundle. Beyond this, don’t bother.

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