Radeon 9600 Pro Review

[@drunkredninja]

This thing is sweet, I still have one. I softmodded a 9550 to 9600.

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

Having been using a Radoen 7500 for the last week the performance in these benchmarks makes me jealous. The 9600 truely was a brilliant card, still is for retro uses.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea the 7500 is not that powerful, it's ok for older Windows 98 games, but the Voodoo 3 is usually the better pick for those. The 9000 series is just incredible strong, even the lower 9200 packs a punch,

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

PhilsComputerLab: Yep, the 9000 Series is one of my favourite series of graphics cards, (Mainly cause I grew up using a 9100IGP Chip) this 7500 is in an Emac, otherwise I'd look into changing it.

[@1NIGHTMAREGAMER]

Budget-Builds Official Voodoo 4 4500 has extra spots for ram maybe try taking one that dead taking the ram chips off and puting it on the working card see if it goes from 32 to 64mb ram

[@LS3ftw15]

One thing worth noting about the 9600 vs the 9500/9700/9800 is the lack of AGP 2x 3.3V signaling.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

A lot of the low end 9000 series cards were just rebrands of the 8000 cards. The 9000 pro was a shrinked rename of the 8500 and the 9100 was a 8500 LE. (Hint: The 9000 pro is the faster of the two) Video decoding comes down to the codec used. A more modern h264 codec will have isses even at 720p while some good old MPEG-1/2 or DivX/XivD wil run fine. Still have a 8500 LE and a 9200 around. They run fine.

[@balazsvilaga8040]

Goddamit i was using this for a while after the FX5200.i was impressed with its performance,back in the day,Half_life 2 run at 1024*768 with high details,pretty playable,like Far Cry 1,NFS U2,MW.Carbon...With a 2100+ Athlon XP and 768 MB ram.Upgrading to GF6600(non-GT) is like having it after the FX 5200.I belive it was the golden era of PC gaming.

[@TheVanillatech]

The 6600 non GT was a bit of an anomaly. I mean it had the DX9 legs and it was a decent performer for the mid range, but the GT just knocked the socks off it. The 6600GT was though one of the best GPU's ever made, in terms of features and performance and price. And yeah, that was indeed in the golden era of PC gaming. You could say that was from the dawn of 3Dfx and PowerVR (1996) and windows 95 with Direct Draw and Pentium II machines, probably up until the AMD HD5XXX era.

[@balazsvilaga8040]

Totally agree.the non-GT 6600 also had a lot of OC potential,i was able to hit 490 Mhz on the core,i forgot the mem,i had an inno3d model back then.I also want to mention i have a glorious AGP VGA collection with 3 6600 GTs thats in fully working condition.The most precious is an AEOLUS 6600 GT.Its just plain beauty.I have like maybe 35-40 pieces,6800 GS/XT/GT god i love em.

[@NoNant55]

I Had a very similar setup to yours, with athlon xp 2400+, Radeon 9550 and 768MB of RAM

[@ricardobarros1090]

​@@NoNant55me too

[@TheVanillatech]

9600Pro was a greatly positioned card. Not many could afford the 9700Pro, but everyone wanted to be playing DX9 titles which were being released. The 9600Pro offered great framerates at decent settings for a good price AND super DX9 support. Of course the *smart* buyer would have taken the 9500Pro with the L-shaped VRAM and modded it into the full 9700Pro! Or waited a few months and snapped up the 6600GT ;-)

[@RarivMorben]

I bought one of these after watching this video, and it's a surprisingly good card. Great for early XP games.

[@bulgingbattery2050]

I had one of these in circa 2003-2004, and it was awesome!

[@Rhole]

This brings back good memories. I had a Radeon 9550 that overclocked like a dream.

[@ricardobarros1090]

Me too

[@unclerubo]

I remember going to my friend's house and playing Half Life 2 for the first time on a Radeon 9600. We used to joke about the real world looking almost as good as HL2...

[@philscomputerlab]

Half-Life 2 looks mint, but the updated Steam release looks even nicer.

[@spencemossman4027]

yeah, half life 2 holds up really well. i am still quite impressed with the visuals all these years later.

[@RediscoveringRetro]

I'm a massive 9700pro fan so I've just added a 9600xt to my small collection. Love these cards.

[@LigerZero1985]

oh the memories, i still have a working radeon 8500 in my collection

[@SlaV0]

I really love videos such that one! I was growing up at the time when these cards were on the market and I was crazy about performance and benchmarks. So this video brings a lot of memories. thanks :)

[@Toothpick1987]

Wow, I never knew about the shim on the 9800 Pro. As a young and budding computer enthusiast I replaced what I thought was the thermal paste on it after the fan started becoming louder and louder. This broke the card. I remember spending about 10 months saving up for it. It put a considerable dent in my confidence at the time. Good to know it wasn't really my fault! :)

[@liamiangaming7931]

That old amd catalyst looked so simple and nice, even if I do like the Radeon software nowadays.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea everything on a single page. Now there are heaps of tabs and settings all over the shop. But then also more features.

[@liamiangaming7931]

@@philscomputerlab true.

[@ivanromashkin9569]

The nice video! The same Radeon 9600 Pro as it was in my first PC! The same list of games which I had played 12 years ago! Thanks a lot for this, man!

[@philscomputerlab]

That's awesome :D I tried to pick suitable games, especially if it's on GOG, and you see a game that fits, let me know and I can add it.

[@DanIsNotHome]

I remember getting my mum drive me to the PC store after school and rushing to get the 9600 Pro the first day it came out and then rushing to make my Macca's job on time 😂 That was the slowest shift ever waiting to go home but oh man did Desert Combat run amazing on it compared to the GF2 MX400 it replaced that night 😁

[@philscomputerlab]

Great story, thanks for sharing! Yes time was going so slow back in those young days :D

[@ComandanteJ]

The second GPU I ever had was in a sweet Pentium 4 HT system that my parents got me for christmas, a Radeon X600Pro 256MB, in PCI Express. From what I remember reading in forums and magazines, performance was basically the same as the 9600 Pro, and boy was I happy. I had been using a Riva TNT2 for the longest time, paired with a PIII-800, and the X600Pro/PIV HT was a dream setup. It ran HL2 like butter, even at 1280x1024.

[@jackedup447]

For some models of the ati 9600 pro i.e. OEM versions of the 9600 pro, they actually came with the yellow thermal pad.

[@ScanlineCity]

Found a low profile version of the 9600 Pro 256mb....Never knew they made such a thing

[@deathdoor]

Finally the legend.

[@KayX291]

my god the memories with this card. It served me well way back in 2004 up until 2010.

[@georgez8859]

Thanks Phil, Excellent Cards. I still have a 9550 and a 9600 All in Wonder

[@GiSWiG]

I think a comparison of the Pro against the XT would be interesting. It would be interesting to see how the R360 of the XT compares to the R350 of the Pro.

[@arranmc182]

OMG the 9600 Pro was the first ever AGP card I owned and only the 2nd GPU I had ever brought myself as my first was Radeon 9250 PCI

[@Raptor3388]

Same here, my first graphics card was a Hercules Radeon 9000 PCI, later I bought a Radeon 9600 Pro 128Mb (Is till have it)

[@mikcnmvedmsfonoteka]

Same for me i recently got a nice Windows XP P4 PC which has almost exact parts i had back in a 2003-2005 , IP4 - 3,0 Ghz , 512 MB DDR1 400mhz ram (2x256mb - max 1GB), CD/RW - DVD play, ​3 1⁄2 floppy drive , 120GB IDE HDD and 9600 Pro 128mb it also was first GPU i bought ! Its funny cause this PC was going to trash at my work so i saved it - now i will have a really nice retro PC ! i Will replace PSU cause its old and scary !

[@ricardobarros1090]

Thank you Phils my friend, I have 2 ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, good memory

[@drzeissler]

the last ati dos-compatible videocard is the 9200, from 9600 upwards the cards have some errors under dos.

[@a4e69636b]

Your video has really good timing. I was just looking for a ATI Radeon 9600 video only a week ago. This is the video card in my iMac G5. It makes Warcraft 3 and Star Trek Elite Force look very good.

[@philippepanayotov9632]

This video is amazing as everything you do on this channel. 😊

[@agevenisse3252]

I have a "brand new" 9600 XT 256MB. Unfortunately it had the crappy Sacon FZ capacitors, and half of them had bulged by just lying in a drawer for 10 years. I replaced all of them with Panasonic and Nichicon caps before testing it yesterday, and it works! :) It looks like your card has better capacitors. The ones to avoid/replace often have the model number "FZ54I" or similar, and are usually 1500uF 6.3v or 1000uF 6.3v. They were common on both ATI- and Nvidia-cards back then. At badcaps they call them the worst caps ever produced ;)

[@ricardobarros1090]

😮😢

[@bojidar200]

Thermal grease is also sort of glue to keep the heatsink in place, also use in a chipset heatsinks.

[@AIM9XSW]

The 9600 came in both 128 MB and 256 MB variants. I can confirm that the 256 MB cards use a lower memory clock (400 MHz effective for the 256 MB model and 600 MHz effective for the 128 MB model) and you get about a 14% performance hit with the 256 MB model and its lower memory frequency in 3DMark 2003 (~3000 3DMarks vs 3500 3DMarks with my setup, described below). The 9600 Pro is still a great choice, and is very compatible with older MS-DOS games and classic Windows 98/early Windows XP games running with ATI Catalyst 6.2. Stability is greatly improved for MS-DOS games (within Win 98SE) if you install the "Unofficial Service Pack." I built two retro PCs using a using a Socket 775 platform (ASRock 775i65G, revisions 2.1 and 3.0), Pentium 4 520/2.8 GHz CPUs with 1 GB of RAM. Both run Win98SE and Windows XP beautifully with Radeon 9600s.

[@shiveringisles3509]

is the extra memory worth the hit?

[@AIM9XSW]

@@shiveringisles3509 In my case, the answer is "no." I dual-boot these machines with Windows XP, and the performance drop was noticeable with the GOG version of Star Wars Battlefront 2, Far Cry (GOG), and Half Life 2. If just running Win 98SE, a 256 MB 9600 should work well with a decent CPU; however, if performance is more important, the 128 MB model with the faster memory clock is better.

[@crogeek]

This card was on my p4 from 2004 until 2011 until P4 chipset of my 3.0ghz Northwood has died, so this was MUCH better card than radeon 9700 pro and 9800 pro which were actually real hell of cards, ATI in that time made insanely huge mistake putting so small fan on 9700/9800 series - I replaced like 3 radeon 9800pro (even I had XT one which was worse) in one year because they all died due to over heating and yes I didn't overclock them or anything in this fashion. Cheers from Croatia.

[@the_motherfucker]

"Much" isn't an acronym

[@Igorekx]

Did you do the trick with replacing thermal pads on these 9700-9800 graphics cards? They were still going kaput?

[@crogeek]

@@Igorekx I don't recall, but I know stories this didn't help, most of 9700/9800 series had massive thermal issues, because thy had very small ventilator and they produced lots of heat. I had also 9800 XT which also burned in like 4 months time, and I never OCed my GPUs or anything like that. I am assuming 9700 and 9800 had design flaws. Cheers, thanks for any replies

[@Igorekx]

@@crogeek Got it. Thanks. I will probably underclock high-end GPU’s before I build my retro systems.

[@RuruFIN]

I remember that issue with the shim with my 9700 Pro, just popped it away with a knife and some nail polish remover got that dried TIM away.

[@kztech1319]

At 6:54 , you mean the equivalent of a Radeon 9600, right? I clearly remember that T2 is DX9 compatible while Radeon 9000 has zero DX9 support.

[@philscomputerlab]

YES, 9600!

[@jacobw446]

I bought it NEW when it came out. It was expensive at its time, but was INCREDIBLE!

[@philscomputerlab]

Do you happen to remember how much it cost back when you purchased one?

[@jacobw446]

Think I paid $450. In fact, I ordered it and they accidentally shipped it to my house about a week before the official release day. I remember doing online 3d bench scores and for that week, I had the highest scores posted online. Here is their price in 2003, about $400USD. videocardz.net/ati-radeon-9800-pro-128mb/

[@jacobw446]

And I still own it in my 2003 machine.. :) p4 2.8ghz intel system. I dont throw anything away that still works for retro gaming

[@airmicrobe]

It's fantastic because without shadow 10+ fps. It adds the wing for playable gaming with budget build pc!

[@techniksaal254]

The yellow gunk they used as thermal pad didn't harden out when aging, it was a hard pile of junk when the card was new. It was wuite a hassle when I replaced the cooler of my 9500Pro (128-Bit) back in the days.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea it's super annoying. They stopped this with the 9600 Pro cards and later X800 series, so that's good to see.

[@PierreVonStaines]

Such an awesome card along with the 9600XT for low power rigs. I ended up getting a FireGL T2-128 off your previous video. As you stated mate - the FireGL T2 works great as a 9600 alternative in a Windows 98 machine.

[@philscomputerlab]

Oh nice, yea the FireGL can be cheap alternatives. I will cover a few more models soon :D

[@PierreVonStaines]

Forgot to say, a great bonus of the the FireGL T2-128 I bought has a core clock runs at 400Mhz which is the same as the 9600Pro I believe which was a nice surprise!

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea AFAIK it's a 9600 Pro equivalent.

[@wertywerrtyson5529]

I had a 9600pro 64mb in my first ever gaming build. It had a Pentium 4B 2.8ghz OC at 3.2ghz and 1GB of RAM. At the time people said 512MB of RAM was enough but I wanted to have extra. I upgraded it with a 9800pro 128mb as soon as I could afford to before selling it a couple of years later and building an Athlon 64 PC.

[@ricardobarros1090]

ATI 9600 Pro 64 MB VRAM??? It's not right

[@tucker21222]

That's the one thing you always have to do lots of research and that way you know your parts just recently I acquired a Radeon x1800 GTO from what I understand my card is a mid-range product sometimes power and requirements for older cards are too much for the system the card I acquired seems to be running pretty okay given that I only have a 300 watt power supply but that's enough but I had to do a whole lot of research and a whole lot of searching so it really does pay to do your research especially when you're building a retro XP box

[@iraklispap1369]

Having 9600pro on windows 98 p3 machine. Excellent for windows games but on dos games i have screen tearing and bad perfomance.

[@swatik777yandexru]

5:29 Acetone helps to remove firm thermopaste

[@Wil3vlbc9gvk604]

This is my xp machine: Semprom 3000+ socket 754 K8v-X SE with k8t800 chipset 2GB DDR1 800 HD 3650 512MB AGP All mainstream but very balanced.

[@philscomputerlab]

I tried the 3650 recently, it didn't work out so well for me, maybe to do with the AGP bridge I don't know.

[@Wil3vlbc9gvk604]

I had to install que 12.1 hotfix drivers. But even with this driver, powerslide is very bugy in directx mode. Other games are working fine.

[@Tc4ify]

@@philscomputerlab There's really no reason to use AGP cards with an XP gaming rig, unless you're specifically going for an early-XP era, but that's a bit pointless. Otherwise, a gtx 285 will make short work of any XP era game and they are still cheap. I recently managed to get one with the 200-series specific Arctic Accelero Extreme cooler for just 25€ (stock ones can be had for as low as 10 sometimes) and while i did also get a 4650 agp for 15€, that was pure luck, as I normally see even the above mentioned 3650s for like 40, while 3850s and 4670s are obviously even more.

[@mxthunder2]

Would be nice to know the rest of the system specs and compare some other video cards of the period as the numbers are meaningless without knowing the rest of the system. Not too many people know how fast an obscure fireGL card performs as a point of reference.

[@MusicHavenSG]

I had a 9600XT back then! The first card I can play Act of War Direct Action with! The GeForce MX 440 I had didn't had the required shader level so it couldn't run it.

[@RetroPCUser]

I bought the Radeon 9600XT (R96A) recently at a thrift store for $4.99 + tax. Could use some cleaning, but, nothing majorly broken (all of the caps are in place; 2 are bulged, but, not leaking, and no scraped traces). Edit: I installed the card in my Windows 98SE and everything went south. The monitor reports out of range and Windows 98SE doesn't boot or it reboots.

[@njdarudedovich6126]

you deserve 500k subs

[@philipcooper8297]

What a blast from the past. Nice game selection, it really brought back many memories, although back then I didn't care for the frame rate. Also, I miss the old low TDP cards, that could actually do some proper gaming. Nowadays we have 150-180W TDP cards, that barely keep up with the game devs and their HW demands.

[@the_motherfucker]

If you only look at what the latest flagship cards are, it may look like low TDP cards aren't a thing anymore but they still very much are. The GT 1030, GTX 1650, RTX A2000, RX 550, and RX 6400 all have a low TDP, don't require power connectors, and have low profile variants but they're all very much capable of gaming

[@MaTtRoSiTy]

Back to my favourite era - nice!

[@dodolurker]

Very cool video, thanks! The tip about the metal shim is really useful, I have a couple video cards from that series, that's an excellent tip. Also a question - what aftermarket coolers for Radeon 9800/9600 Pro would you recommend that are available today, from eBay, for example? 🙂

[@philscomputerlab]

The models change a bit over time, I would just run a search on eBay for vga cooler or graphics cooler and take a look what's available.

[@alextirrellRI]

Oof, I think I had card die because of that thermal issue. Maybe it's not totally dead!

[@Oldsukerbole]

How good is DOS compatibility? Can you still play games like Doom, Jazz and Keen on this card? Currently building a retro dos machine. Bx440, Celeron 1,3, 512 mb, Win98 voodoo 2 sli I’m still looking around what a good main videocard could be. This could be an option or a Geforce 2 gts.

[@armorgeddon]

Do you need more 3D power than what the V2 SLI provides? If not you could go with for example a Riva 128 for DOS. Check this for GPU compatibility with DOS: gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

[@Nemesizzonline]

Ah yes, the Radeon 9600 Pro, it was the first GPU I bought myself. I read a review where they tested a 9700 Pro and 9500 Pro, and I thought "Hmm, well, 9600 Pro must fit in between those". Unfortunatly it didn't, the 9500 Pro was actualy faster than the 9600 Pro. Still, it was a good card if you could get the drivers working (the driver on the CD didn't work lol, and with a 56K dial-in modem a new driver was too large to download). The Radeons back then performed a lot better than the GeForce FX series (especialy the 9700 Pro was a monster). I've had the 9600 Pro for years untill it went up in flames...litterly, some component failed when shutting down Windows (so not during a game, but during shutting down...) and burned a big hole in the card. A shame, because they were still nice for retro PC's, and now I have to do with less powerfull cards (like an GF FX5600 or GF4 Ti4400).

[@ИльяВитцев]

9600 was pure power. I was playing games that seem impossible to run on this gpu, like Car Mechanic Simulator 2015. I didn't have rust effects though and was getting around 40 fps, had Minecraft 1.7.4 running at max (except render distance, which was kept at 4-8) with very playable fps of 70-100. I bet you could have played EVE Online, if it was 2006 outside. And it had great OC potential, at least for me. I had Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro Advantage 128 mb. And I still have it, it's fine and dandy, works without any troubles after me, using it excessively in harsh conditions. And it was so much better than nVidia alternatives! That is the time when AMD (ATI) had incredibly powerful GPUs compared to nVidia. I also still have FX5200, it's so much worse. Even though their stats are almost identical. It still can run minecraft, though. Slower, but it can.

[@eightbit1975]

I have one of these amongst a few other Radeon cards from the era. I never really gave them a chance until recently. I was using them as "fillers" while I waited to obtain funds for Nvidia cards, but you know what? Many of these are really good? I have a 9600 in a P4 XP rig and a 7200 in a PIII rig and they perform really well. That said I have decided to keep them in these machines and save my money ;)

[@7828191]

I have the exact same card in my collection :). Also a 9800 pro 128mb (agp 4/8x), and a 9800 pro 256mb.

[@remynisce33]

Dang, even the first San Andreas has better physics than cyberpunk..

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Remember that some manufacturers also selled cards with 200 MHz (400 DDR) memory. I got one of these from PowerColor. It runs quite fine with Catalyst 6.3, The latest official driver for the card is 6.2, but the next one can be installed over it and actually improves performance under Windows 98 SE quite a bit. Noticed the lack of features for really really old games tough, but nothing a Geforce 3 can't solve. What setting in Doom 3 too chose with a 320 MiB card like the 8800 GTS or a 384 MiB card like a 8800 GS or 9600 GSO? nVidia had some odd numbers with odd memory bandwith even back then (like the 448 bit bus on a GTX 260 and 192 bit on some other cards)

[@austinzechar5580]

I don't know if you're respond or not, but I bought a Radeon 9600 pro just today. You said it's 128MB GDDR on yours, but the one I bought says it's 256MB GDDR2. Do they make the model I bought or did I get ripped off?

[@hubzcaps]

love this card. had 2 of em

[@MJ-uk6lu]

Black Radeon PCB looks so good.

[@dmitryvorobyev1986]

Just got another retro laptop - Acer Ferrari 3400 with ATI 9700 mobility, that is actually a copy of desktop 9600pro. Now benchmarking and comparing with desktop card. Thanks for the video.

[@nanoriva9330]

love your videos! where do get these gpu coolers?. Thx!

[@GAWIEKAT]

I managed to pick up an ATI 9600 xt 256mb and an HD 3650 agp 512mb for $10 NZD ($6.65 USD)

[@philscomputerlab]

Great prices!

[@DhinCardoso]

Does it work with nGlide? What about DOS games?

[@TheDeeplyCynical]

Had one of these in the first PC I ever built, with an AMD Athlon XP 3200+, Gigabyte GA7VAXP and Videologic Sonicfury soundcard.

[@eklipsegirl]

Thanks for the video! I have several retro gaming builds, one has Voodoo 5, other has Radeon HD 4850 and I'm choosing between Radeon 9600 Pro and Radeon 9800 Pro. Which one would you recommend to install in my third build? My 9800 is already modified, has Zalman fan on it, but it's still too loud with its 1600 RPM, even with Noctua low-noise adapter I've had laying around.

[@Imperious685]

Great video again as usual. On the subject of Your driving skills Phil, are You aware that if You could get hold of a used Logitech G25 they will work on everything from Windows 98se and up.

[@philscomputerlab]

I play very little and I would hardly use a steering wheel to be honest!

[@Imperious685]

No probs. I wasn't really being serious. I actually do online car racing in Assetto Corsa Thurs nights, so it's obvious when someone is steering with the keyboard as the the wheels are fully turned or straight, no analog control.

[@CMDRSweeper]

Ah the 9600 Pro, it was during this age that people were hunting for the 9500 Pro and the 9800 SE with the L shaped memory modules. As you could unlock a 9800 or if lucky, 9800 Pro out of them.

[@thompson4620]

That heatsink looks crazy, where did you get that?!

[@arcticfox04]

By chance PhilsComputerLab have you looked into the SiS video cards for AGP? The 305 was around a TNT2 M64/Vanta and 315 which was quite a value (Overclocked it gave GeForce MX400 like proformance).

[@philscomputerlab]

No I haven't, not yet at least! But I've been told they are very average...

[@TheDrunkenPL]

Phil, what would you recommend for retro build? Radeon 9600 Pro or GeForce FX 6200? I know that this is completely different league but with 9600 I have new opportunities with Win XP. However my target was 98 with good compatibility for DOS games (nGlide etc) and Win 98 era games + some extras like Max Payne. Would Radeon make a hit on compat. with nGlide and older GL games?

[@devonbartholomew2115]

i had one of these for years, the one with the heat pipe from sapphire, then I upgraded to a HD4650 1GB and WOW did that card ever blow my mind

[@VDavid003]

My first ever pc had one, idk if it was a 9600 or 9600 pro, but it did die on me... Brings back memories, tho!

[@zhongyangli]

This is what I've got for my shuttle mini pc running windows 98. I picked the card for 5 euros, overclocked it to core 492 MHz and VRAM 700 MHz. The overclocked 9600 pro is insanely powerful, meanwhile handled well by a 200 W PSU

[@dylanringproductions160]

Can you review the ati Radeon hd 3440/3450? It would be much appreciated!

[@GameTechRefuge]

Asus ENGTX 285 was the first large PCIE card I ever got new. Before that I was a budget buyer. Will have to make use of that electromyne discount and set it up again in a 64bit build.

[@dave4shmups]

Great video! But what CPU did you use for these tests?

[@philscomputerlab]

dave4shmups I'll add the details soon!

[@IngeldGaming]

Awesome review of an awesome card.

[@philscomputerlab]

Thank you!

[@lukaneusprime]

Hi Phil, I'm wondering what was your test platform here for this card. Thanks.

[@bpcgos]

Once upon a time, my naive 19yrs old self ditched Geforce MX 400 and had an ATI Radeon HD 9550 256 MB instead so that I would be able to play Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow(and many-many other PS 2.0 PC game goodness released between 2004-2005). Such a great decision because I still knew nothing about PC hardware at the time ( internet still a rare and expensive things to have in a 3rd world country like mine)

[@philscomputerlab]

The 9550 has something of a cult status, it overclocked really well and was terrific value.

[@RaPtOr9600]

Had same card, served me well for several years, on xp2600+ later i upgrade to 7600GS then i finally made jump to PCIE

[@Meatpipeify]

Bought one of these in 2003 to play Half Life 2. This was the very first video card I bought with my own money at 15 years old. Had it paired with an Athlon XP 2400+.

[@charlesb9602]

I bought 2 of these online from sapphire and built a couple systems with amd cpu's. They worked for like 5 years very well. edit: back in 2004-5

[@blakedmc1989RaveHD]

great card especially with Windows 98 games

[@boumerguy7042]

Unfortunately the given benchmark does not compare to similar GPUs. Would have been great to add Ti4200 and 9800Pro as a comparison. I bought a 9600Pro AGP because it's currently cheap and suitable for a Windows 98 PC as an alternative to Ti4200, but I think 6600GT/7600GT (AGP) are a better deal. 9800Pro price are indecent. I think it's even worst for 9600XT and 9800XT.

[@Synthematix]

Phil just bought one of these (9800pro) to pair up with my socket 754 3700+ on my ASUS K8V SE Deluxe motherboard, cant wait till it arrives

[@philscomputerlab]

Awesome 😎

[@u263a3]

Very cool you got the code names right

[@Goatie89]

Phil great vid, but how do I play half life 2 without steam? Really curious how far the engine has come from release.

[@philscomputerlab]

Half-Life 2 is one of quite a few Steam games that are actually DRM free :)

[@armorgeddon]

Do you still need to have Steam to play the game or can you install the game from DVD and play it without ever having Steam installed?

[@stevey500]

I remember Doom 3 running this well. I had a pentium 4 1.6ghz with the 9600 Pro and ran Doom 3 so well. I also had a 12" Macbook Pro (that thing was the tits) with I believe a Geforce 5200Go and it ran Doom 3 in OS X very well.

[@RetroTinkerer]

I would really love to see a series of videos like you did about the best sound card for win 98... There would be any reason to get a 9600pro instead of a 9700pro or a Radeon x800? I'm considering getting a 6800GS and a 9700pro, what would be a nice CPU to pair with those GPUs?

[@92trdman]

nostalgia

[@spidermike3866]

My first card..

[@TimonEckholdt-cx9ns]

My first Gaming Card, europe version is red and quiet different in many details

[@d4rks0m3thing]

My 9600pro runs at 580MHz core and 375MHz memory =D which oddly enough is DDR2. First I modded the voltage regulator to add a potentiometer to raise vcore, installed a mollex as a vcore measure point, swapped the VRM inductor, soldered a bunch of capacitors, installed mosfests heatsinks, ram heatsinks, new GPU heatsink and an 80mm fan. Then I flashed the BIOS in order to tighten the memory timings. The thing now clocks like crazy and I guess if I improve the cooling it'd go further.

[@philscomputerlab]

Very nice!

[@RetroKomodo]

Hi Phil, I was watching this one and got to the part where you talk about Half-Life 2: Collectors Edition running without Steam. I'm putting together an XP gaming PC video myself, and wonder how on earth you managed to get HL2CE installed without Steam? This is now 4 years later than this video and things have changed a bit - Steam no longer works on XP, but having bought this edition of HL2 to install I found no way to install it 'Steamlessly'.. so in the end I got it from the Internet Archive site. I'd love to know how to install it minus Steam though, and I've seen similar comments in Vogons threads and so on! Might you be able to point me in the right direction? Maybe worth a video perhaps ;)

[@philscomputerlab]

Did you know that Steam HL2 is DRM free? Just copy the game (from the game folder) onto offline Retro PC and it fully works :)

[@RetroKomodo]

@@philscomputerlab Hi Phil - thanks for the reply!! Well, I copied over from a couple of Win 10 machines to USB, and then over onto the XP machine - but in each case after trying the exe and any number of bits tagged on the end of the shortcut, it just refuses to run.. It shows for a moment in Task Manager then vanishes. That's when I gave up and got the version from the Internet Archive.. Btw (shameless self promotion), after watching your ultimate XP build video I followed in your footsteps and did some benchmarking of 9 series cards on XP - including a 980 Ti if you'd care to have a look!

[@RetroKomodo]

@@philscomputerlab Just tried again this morning. Fresh XP build behind me and copied over HL2 from my Win 10 Steam folder using an external drive. Copied to the XP machine and.. nothing happens :(

[@philscomputerlab]

@@RetroKomodo What happens when you run the executable? Weird.

[@Kz-ds8gb]

Oh, they are selling a nice New "All-in-Wonder 9600 pro' on ebay but you want to get the odd dvi adapter that i have no idea what it's called to find it.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea I did contact the seller, the cables are propriety, you won't find them. So those AIW cards are basically useless, that's why they are quite cheap. Don't buy them.

[@realnamesnotgiven6193]

You sir may have just solved one of my problems. My ati 9700 pro maybe dead and I didn't know it. Thanks I'll look into it a bit more.

[@philscomputerlab]

Sweet, do let us know how you go!

[@chrumczyk5494]

I had one from Sapphire but a 256mb version. I think it was called Atlantis or something. I had it till like 2006, cause I chipped of one transistor and it was fried...

[@Darxide23]

I still had the non-Pro version of this card until recently. In fact, it's still in use. I built a computer for my ex-gf's daughter and used this card in it.

[@chanakasat1]

Hi Phil thanks for this video! So the number kind of indicates its performance compared to others right? i.e.. 9800>9700>9600>9500>9200>9100>9000?

[@philscomputerlab]

Almost, the 9200 series is an exception :)

[@AndreiNeacsu]

In my opinion, the 9500 is a better card than the 9600. I had several versions of 9600 (Pro, XT and another one), but I always wanted a 9500, 9700 or 9800 (not the SE, or LE, or whatever it was called).

[@Raptor3388]

The 9100 is much faster than a 9000, it's a rebranded 8500LE, and the 9000 is a cut down 8500. The 9200 is a slightly improved 9000, on benchmarks they perform the same. But most of the 9200 models are 9200SE models with 64bit memory which lowers the performance quite a bit.