Unfortunately for the A-Trend card, its bloated price will likely be its downfall. Underperforming the Diamond Stealth card by about 10% across the board, the true story of the A-Trend ATC3970 is told. A 10% performance decrease for a 5% price increase - hardly a bargain.

While both cards are hardly speed demons, it is still startling to see how poorly this chipset does on newer games such as Descent and Quake3. While they may be considered playable in Quake2 even at 1024x768, not much else positive can be said. 13 frames per second (Q3 at 800x600x32) is hardly playable, and even at 640x480 the performance is nothing stellar.

With its "gamma correction" and problems in Quake3 with switching resolutions, it's hard to say anything good about the A-Trend ATC3970's 3D Quality.

Ranging from bad to worse, none of the games we tested looked "crisp" or even close. In fact, imagine a silk screen being placed over your monitor while you play a Quake3 deathmatch. All you will get is blur and haziness.

Seriously lacking in the 2D quality department, the A-Trend disappoints again. With graphics that strangely seem to ghost themselves even on your windows desktop, prolonged usage could likely be problematic.

Not what we have come to expect from the current generation of video cards.