Personally If I had to choose between a 256 MB 9600 or a 128 MB 9600 Pro I'd opt the Pro as the performance is a tad higher. But even with 256 MB memory this product which is priced at roughly € 170 still is about 30-40 Euro cheaper compared to the 128 MB pro (€ 200)model and that's what's important for this product.  In all fairness, right now there are very little games that need such a massive amount of memory to store their textures in. The only one that I know of is Unreal 2003 which can utilize more than 128 MB texture memory. Future games will probably utilize more texture memory also ... but, I doubt that this product will be fast enough for such massive future games. Personally I'd chip in for just a few bucks more and buy a Radeon 9500 Pro, 9600 Pro or XT model or hey, don't rule out the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 and 5900XT series either.

A big downside, overclocking is disabled in this series at BIOS level. For all of you who really do want to overclock this graphics card can grab RivaTuner and activate the SoftR9x00 patch which will patch the drivers so they allow overclocking. Downside to this is that the programmer has to release a new patch with every new driver release and you have to patch with every new driver. There are also floating some unlocked BIOS'es on the web, but by flashing them into the card you will forfeit your warranty.

The big advantage you will see here is a fully AGP8x based product that performs mediocre for an interesting price. The true power of this product is that it's 100% DirectX9 compatible and can render reasonably okay in such an environment. Feature wise it really is a nice product. For not an extreme amount of money it has everything you want for the time being; CRT, SVideo & DVI-I outputs and do not forget really good DVD/Madia playback and a crispy sharp 2D desktop.

Stability wise everything was peachy perfect on our test-platform. I have to admit that passive cooling worries me a little. However during the entire test we have not noticed artifacts or lockups. I placed a thermal sensor on the GPU during benchmarks and it'll get to ~48 Degrees C which is not a problem at all.

You can expect low to midievel performance and an good set of features to date, you play all DirectX7 and 8 titles in 1280x1024x32 with decent performanc,e and you are able to play some games with features like 4X AA and 8x Anisotropic filtering while maintaining reasonable framerates in 1024x768x32. With DirectX 9 titles that on the other hand is a difference ballgame. Do not expect this card to crunch new DX9 titles. It's simply not powerful enough for it. So there you have the bottom line, it's a nice card for older titles. Personally I'd throw in a couple bucks extra and go for something more powerful.

To recapitulate, the performance of this product combined with it's DirectX 9 features will make this a reasonable €170 buy in the lower category of mid-range products. Do not expect miracles performance wise.

Product: Creative Labs Radeon 9600 256 MB
Manufacturer: Creative Europe
MSRP: € 170
Seek best price for this product.