A note:

Well... what can you say when you’re holding one of the fastest 3D video cards on the market? Normally it’s nothing, because it’s too hard to stop grinning. As GruntvillE has grown over the last year and readers became more diverse, we began to get a lot of hardware listed in the “What do you want to see reviewed” section of the forums. If you’re not familiar with this section then I suggest you swing by! We’ve done a great job of answering the requests we receive in there. As of lately, there aren’t too many requests we haven’t been able to provide. You’ll need to be a registered member of the forums to make a request but registration is easy.

The more hardware requests we received, the more we looked into doing hardware reviews. We wanted to make sure it could be applied to modding. For me it was easy, hardware is one of my favorite things to mod. I absolutely love taking my hardware to the edge…and sometimes over it. If you’ve seen my video card *blush*, well let’s just say it’s nothing a little circuit pen couldn’t fix… this time. The point being, that GruntvillE will now be offering tons of reviews on hardware including; motherboards, video cards, drives and more. Now this is not the first hardware review we’ve done, but I felt I should take the time to let you know that they’ll become more prevalent in the near future.

Introduction:

ATI is a name we’re all familiar with. The battle between ATI and nVidia is, lucky for us, never ending. It's very similar to the competitive battles between Chevy, Chrysler and Ford. Each has taken its turn in the spotlight as the King of the Hill…only to find out that the other just took their spot. Sometimes it happens so fast they can’t even get their marketing campaigns finished:) Well, we’re looking at the 128MB version of the 9800 Pro. This card offers the fastest GPU from ATI and it falls second in line as ATI’s fastest video card. The only difference from this card and ATI’s fastest card, is the amount and type of memory. The top card from ATI offers 256MB’s or DDR2. With today’s current list of games this won’t make a large difference. With the soon to be released games like Doom III, HL2 and more, using new technologies that will utilize the additional memory; the 256MB version of the 9800 Pro will certainly show its strength.

This card has caused quite a stir on every site in the industry, and its performance is heralded by many as the best. ATI had some driver issues when they released the 9700 as we reported last year. We’ll also be testing the 9800 Pro out on tons of games to ensure it offers global driver stability and platform support. We’ll be dissecting the card to show you what it’s made of and piecing it back to show you how it performs. Of course we can’t forget the basics, and that’s what we’re off to now.