Serious Sam 2 is another first person shooter game that is very graphics intensive. I set all of the video options, ran the Yodeler demo, and recorded the results. As I suspected this card did not do so well with the game, at 1024×768 the frame rate ended up being 39.7 which isn’t bad but also not very good. After increasing the resolution the results suffered and the game would be unplayable with the frame rates so low. The best thing to do in this situation would be to keep the resolution at 1024×768 and turn down some of the video options.
Unreal Tournament 2003 is a really good and graphically stressful game. I used the standard benchmarking tool which was included with the game to do this testing so you would be able to more easily compare with the results. The first half of the benchmark does a flyby test going through three of the maps and records the output. The results with this benchmark were very similar to that of Serious Sam 2, not too good. 1024×768 would be playable but any other resolution above that would get pretty choppy.
Unreal Tournament 2003 also does a bot match benchmark with the same three maps. The results with this portion of the benchmark were lower than the flyby as usual with any video card. Again the same results and comments hold true with this benchmark so there really isnt much more to say about it.
Conclusion
As you can see from all of the benchmarking results this card is definitely a low end budget solution. The card is not a bad card because it does serve its purpose it simply isn’t going to blow you away and keep you happily gaming.
This card is designed for someone who is looking for a low cost solution who isn’t too concerned about 3D applications. The card does not offer any overclocking at all unless you were to flash the BIOS to something else to give it that ability. I did not know this at first but soon came to realize it as soon as I started trying to overclock it. I also think that the lack of extras missing from this product is quite disappointing.
Though accessories would raise the cost of the card I think that some things would have been nice to have. I do like the fact that it is low profile, offers VGA, DVI, and TV-out, and is silent.
This video card is perfect for someone building a small project system or someone who doesn’t need all the bells and whistles of a Radeon 9800XT. Overall I am fairly happy with the results that this card turned out however I am only going to give it a 7/10. I would really like to thank Power-Color for sending me this card.
Pros
- Low profile design
- VGA, S-Video, DVI, and VIVO functionality
- Red PCB
- Silent because of the passive heatsink
- Low cost
Cons
- No software bundle
- No cables or adapters included
- No overclocking ability
- No DirectX 9
