SUMMARY: After doing a little digging, we quickly discovered that the 9800 Platinum Edition is nothing more than a Radeon 9800 Pro GPU which is cut-down a little to help reduce the retail price for consumers. The 9800 Platinum Edition only uses a 128-bit memory bus compared to the 256-bit on the “true” 9800 Pro and the memory speed is a little slower on the Platinum Edition by around 40MHz (80MHz DDR) which gives the “true” 9800 Pro the ability to push about 2GB more bandwidth per second.
Being a budget level graphics card, the included items inside the package you receive is a little on the plain side of things.
First up you can see this little device above which is quite handy. It’s a DVI to VGA adapter which allows you to use dual VGA displays. While there is really only a minority of users out there who use this kind of setup, it’s handy to have this little device lying around just in case it is required.
Next up you can see the four discs which come inside the package. From the top left we have the driver CDROM which includes a set of ATI’s Catalyst drivers. However, it is strongly recommended you download and install the latest drivers from the ATI website for best performance and stability.
To the right of the driver disc you have a copy of Intervideo’s WinCinema for all your video playback needs. And down below you have a full version copy of Counter Strike: Condition Zero. The software package is very slim but that’s what you get when you are buying a budget orientated graphics card.
The last items on the list are a bunch of cables. The cable on the left is an S-Video cable which allows you to output the display to any device which supports S-Video in – such as a TV. The cable in the middle is much the same as the S-Video cable except it is just a plain RCA cable which doesn’t quite produce the same quality as the S-Video cable. And the final cable on the right is an S-Video to RCA cable.
Now we’ve finished covering what is inside the box, let’s get onto the meat of the issue and check out the graphics card itself.
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