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Sharky Extreme : Monthly Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide |
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Monthly Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide |
December Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 5By Bao Ly December 30, 2002
Cost: $319 The Radeon 9700 Pro is ATi's high-end entry into the highly competitive 3D graphics market, and has left its competition quavering in its wake. Well that might be going a bit too far, but ATi has released a great video card product, and with a renewed effort towards driver development to optimize performance and stability. The Radeon 9700 Pro is loaded with 256-bit, 128MB of 310 MHz DDR RAM (effectively 620 MHz), coupled with a VPU (Visual Processing Unit clocked at 325 MHz. The rendering capability of this video card is untouchable by any other product available on the consumer product, and will in fact let you run today's games at the absolute highest level of performance. Playing at super high resolutions (1600X1200) in current games upcoming games is another plus. The Radeon 9700 Pro also allows you to play games a smooth frame rate at 1024*768 with anisotropic filtering and 4XAA enabled. ATi's patented Smartshader 2.0, Smoothvision 2.0, and Videoshader technologies are integrated into the Radeon 9700, to help bring out higher quality images.
In terms of extra features, the Radeon 9700 Pro has a standard VGA connector, S-VHS out, and a DVI-out connection. Along with its currently unchallenged 3D prowess, the Radeon 9700 Pro still retains ATi's signature trait, superb 2D quality and DVD performance. With NVIDIA's announcement of their Geforce FX series of GPUs to be made available next year, ATI might receive some competition, but for now, at the top end, the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro is untouchable. Also keep in mind that while the All-in-Wonder Radeon 9700 Pro remains a bit out of budget, this card is an excellent option for a truly extreme system builder.
Cost: $750
We may have made a monitor switch in the previous guide, but we've decided to stand pat this time around, and there's certainly very few products in this range that threaten to replace it from the Extreme guide. The 2060u is a 22" monitor with a 20" viewable area. It utilizes their patented Diamondtron tube technology, which is based on the Sony Trinitron, but uses just one electron gun for the basic colors (Red, Green, and Blue), the Sony Trinitron uses three. This Mitsubishi monitor is fabulous with great colors, geometry, with a very comfortable refresh rate of 99.9 Hz at 1600x1200. Unfortunately, the Diamondtron technology still suffers the same design as the Sony Trinitron, and there are two noticeable grey lines running horizontally across the screen. However these lines are not as intrusive in multimedia/gaming applications as they are in productivity applications like Word/Excel. Remember, the Extreme Gaming machine is for games, and multimedia, not knocking out reports!
Cost: $167
The Audigy2 Platinum has all of the connectivity, features, and sound quality that the Extreme Gamer demands. It supports 6.1 Audio (6.1 Speakers to follow within the next few months), has 24-bit internal processing, and 24-bit DACs (digital to analogue converter). Sound quality has also been improved over the previous Audigy card. The Audigy2 is also THX certified, this label for consumer products simply means that the product has met a set standard for high quality audio input and output. The Audigy2 also has support for pre-encoded Dolby Digital EX (6.1) content. This will be more of a factor once 6.1 speakers are made available for the PC. We're aware of the Inspire 6.1 set, but its low output power, and low quality disqualifies it from placement in the Extreme Gaming Machine.
The Audigy2 Drive has gotten a small facelift from the previous Audigy Drive, but the connections remain the same: Headphone jack with volume control, Line In (shared with Mic in), Midi in/out, Optical SPDIF in/out, RCA SPDIF in/out, SB 1394 Port, Infra-red Receiver. For additional convenience, the soundcard also comes with a remote. The back of the card has line outs for front, rear, center, subwoofer, and center rear. Additionally there's a line in port, microphone in port, and a SB1394 FireWire port.
Cost: $350
With its sleek silver design, and great frequency response and sound quality, we find no reason not to recommend the Logitech Z-680 again for this month's Extreme guide. Boasting 450Watts of total system power, the Logitech Z-680 is certainly not a weakling. The subwoofer delivers a healthy 185 Watts, and each satellite pumps out an impressive 53 Watts per channel. It is THX certified which ensures that it has met the same level of quality as the Audigy2 has for output quality. Perhaps the most important feature is the hardware Dolby Digital/DTS decoder with wireless remote. The decoder can be connected to the Audigy2 Platinum via SPDIF optical or RCA (coaxial) SPDIF. And if you prefer to use the analogue connection, you can connect the speakers via triple stereo cables to the back of the soundcard (front/rear/center+sub).
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