MSI Radeon 9550 128MB 128-bit

The Radeon arrived today, 2 days ahead of schedule. Compulsory pictures are included. The card arrived at 2:30pm 4/20/05. I beat the FedEx guy home by about 5 mins. I think he was in front of me on the way home, but he had to stop at the UV.



The package itself was very light (only 2 lbs). The retail box itself was packed within.



A picture of the retail box itself, quite tiny.



The back.



The internals. It came with the bare essentials. Card, booklet, drivers.



A picture of the card itself. Notice the MSI heatsink.



A closer view. Excuse the paper towel I used to clean the case before hand.



A picture of both cards installed. I actually had some trouble getting the card installed. It turns out that NVIDIA and ATI do not co-exist very well, atleast their drivers don't. I had to uninstall the NVIDIA drivers before the ATI card could output a signal. Thank goodness my LCD has dual inputs (VGA adn DVI), so I was able to switch between without trading cables.



For comparison, a picture of my Geforce4 MX440SE PCI video card. It has been a loyal work horse for many years. It's time it was retired. From now on it will re-join my 733mhz Dell at home, this should help my mom play her games a little better. The Dell integrated graphics are not cutting it.



A few preliminary tests with Cinebench and 3DMark2001 indicate that the 9550 is performing at rougly twice the level of the GF4. 3DMark2001 scores are in the high 6000s. I have been putting the card through it's paces and it seem to play Homeworld 2 @ 1280x960 with all the graphics turned up, quite well. Later I hope to overclock the card to 9600 or even 9600Pro speeds.

New Purchase

Just purchased this:



It is a MSI Radeon 9550 w/ 128MB of VRAM. It is the normal 9550 with
the 128-bit interface instead of the SE's crippled 64-bit. I ordered
it today, and there seems to be a problem with my address verification.
Hopefully it will be resolved and I can write a review as soon as
I recieve the card and put it through it's paces.

Also from some of the research I've done, depending on your luck you may
be able to overclock it to 9600 or 9600pro speeds. Not bad, $120 performance
from a $60 card.

$60 @ ChiefValue.com

Ram is VERY good.

A few weeks ago I wrote an Ode to Ram. Well I've finally got some more ram for the desktop (1.3Ghz Athlon). I got a 256MB stick and a 128MB stick of PC133 ram from a friend. This means that the Athlon is now running 2x256MB sticks for a total of 512MB of ram. I have 2 extra 128 sticks that are destined for my Mom's P3 733. Navigating simple windows in Windows XP doesn't seem much faster (not as noticeable a jump as the 128->384MB jump of a few years ago), but once i start to run a few programs together the difference really starts to show itself.

Launching applications is not only quicker but also feel "sturdier". Yes, I know that describing applications as "studry" seems rather silly but that's the best adjective I could come up with. Withb more ram there is no split second delay as the memory is paged to disk, also there is no hard drive sound. This type of feeling, though hard to explain, seems quite tangible when felt in person.

Get as much ram as possible in your computer. You're computer will thanky you for it.