Not content to just sell memory, Crucial Technology has for some time been selling a small range of graphics cards based on ATI's Radeon GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). Its latest card takes over from the Radeon 9700 Pro as the flagship model and is based on ATI's fastest currently available GPU - the Radeon 9800 Pro.

At first glance the card looks very similar to the 9700 Pro, but it's slightly longer and uses a 4-pin Molex connector instead of the easily-bent floppy drive power connector of the 9700 Pro. The basis of the 9800 Pro is the R350 core, basically a higher clocked and tuned version of the 0.15 micron R300 core of the Radeon 9700. ATI has improved the timings and signal integrity of the core to increase the clock speed from the 325MHz of the R300 up to a staggering 380MHz. Also improved is the memory speed, which rises to 340MHz DDR (680MHz) pushing the available bandwidth up to 22GB/s.

The neat trick is that ATI has managed to increase both core and memory speeds without having to resort to any radical changes in cooling, with the heatsink cooler just slightly altered. A point to bear in mind is that the fan is a bit on the noisy side and without any form of fan speed control; this is something you'll have to live with or buy a third party cooling solution. As with the 9700 Pro, the higher clocked 2.8ns Samsung memory chips that the 9800 Pro uses are still bare. As the memory does get very hot after a while, before you start to seriously overclock this beast some memory cooling would aid things no end.

As with all the other Crucial cards you don't pay any extra for a fancy box. The card and bundled cables, drivers, etc. come in a plain white box, but a quick word of praise for how the card itself is protected. It's in an anti-static bag, wrapped in pink foam wrap and then shrink-wrapped to a piece of cardboard, so it's nice and secure.

The software bundle is barely worthy of the name, but then not having a multitude of games in the box does help to keep the cost down. What you do get is a driver CD with Catalyst 3.4 drivers, DirectX9 and Adobe Acrobat and a copy of CyberLink PowerDVD XP4.0. Extra hardware supplied consists of an S-Video cable, an RCA cable and extender, a power cable and a DVI-I to VGA converter.

What makes this particular 128MB 9800 Pro special isn't so much the card itself - it is, after all, a standard ATI reference design for the 9800 Pro - but Crucial's stunning warranty and price. Crucial backs this card with a Limited Lifetime Warranty and free technical support.

The warranty alone makes this one of the best Radeon 9800 Pro cards currently available. When you take into account the excellent value for money and good performance, the Crucial card is hard to beat. The only thing that slightly lets it down is its noisy fan.