Pros: This is a very strong card for the price, and it has done well as an upgrade from my previous 9600XT. What I couldn't run smoothly before, I can now -- though the things that already ran nicely haven't perked too much. Before, Call of Duty 2 with the DX9 settings was unplayable. Now, I can turn up the settings and maintain a satisfactory framerate. Before, Doom3 played nicely on lower settings. Now, I can run it on 'Ultra' settings with FSAA set up to 4x. Half-Life 2 performs beautifully. Oblivion suggests high settings to me now, whereas I could barely play on lower ones before.

Cons: It's a long card, and it was surprisingly heavier than my (now obsolete) previous card, but none of this has proven troublesome. It fits nicely into my box. The card runs a bit warm, but I see no performance hit. My system doesn't have much in the way of cooling, so that may contribute to it. It also has no HDR support which is coming to be popular these days.

Overall Review: Overall, I've been impressed with this card. I was, for a while, quite sure I'd need to go all-out on a new PCI-E system, but this one has saved me a huge chunk of change. It'll now be another year before I have to retire this computer.

Pros: 512MB memory is a plus. The red color is nice, and the heatsink is pretty. It runs almost everything I throw at it at suitable resolutions (1024x768), even with nicer features enabled like anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering. FEAR is almost flawless at high settings, C&C3 is fine so long as a massive battle is underway, and Company of Heroes looks great.

Cons: Outdoor environments in Oblivion kill this card. The fan got the job done while it lasted, but it wore out after about a month and had to be replaced. My system was out of service for days while the parts were on order.

Overall Review: The CD is useless, so don't even bother with it. Download the drivers from the ATi website, install them, and then put the card in. Sometimes there is some interference on the screen, but that could be the DVI/VGA adapter that does it for all I know. I'm disappointed by the fan's short lifespan; but, at the price and considering that the rest of the hardware is rather nice, it's not so bad.

Pros: Fairly easy to install in my box. Nearly all of the memory came right up on the first run. Pretty good price.

Cons: N/A

Overall Review: I wish I could have gotten 2 x 1GB instead. My system has 2gb of RAM now, and I can (and do) use it all up.