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As history would have it, Taiwanese companies have never had a strong foothold in the retail video card market. While the A-Trend ATC3970 is no exception to this rule, it IS available at retail and should not be overlooked.

Better known for its place in the motherboard market, A-Trend does have a reasonably large line of video cards including ones featuring 3dfx' Banshee and Voodoo2 as well as 3Dlabs' Permedia2 and now one with S3's Savage4 Pro, a chip associated with a good price/performance ratio.

Today Sharky Extreme sets out to determine if the A-Trend ATC3970 Savage4 Pro-based video accelerator can live up to the Savage4's promise of acceptable performance for a great price.

See what we found out…

To us, the best reason to opt for a Savage4-based video accelerator is the price. Generally under the $100 price tag, cards based on this chip usually perform on a level above yesterday's performance standards.

The A-Trend ATC3970, for $80-$85, is priced about five dollars over that of its much more popular cousin, the Diamond Stealth III S540, but for reasons unknown to us.

With nothing in the way of bundled software beyond a soft DVD solution, a seemingly poorly designed PCB and a lower clock speed, we find it ludicrous that this card would even cost close to what the Diamond card sells for. With its memory clocked at 125MHz and its core speed the same, the A-Trend ATC3970 underperforms its Diamond counterpart, which clocks in with 143MHz memory and the same 125MHz clock.

It seems corners have been cut to reduce the price of the A-Trend card (in terms of the bundle at least), but these cut corners seem to have no representation in the retail price. While cutting corners can increase profit margins for a company, customers would surely rather see lower prices than higher profit margins.