Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Crucial Radeon 7500
Crucial release a video card for the rest of us
| Product | Radeon 7500 |
|---|---|
| Company | Crucial |
| Web | www.crucial.com/uk |
| Price | £40.99 including shipping |
| We like | Great image quality, price |
| We don't like | Not very fast |
| Rating | 8/10 |
| Requirements |
A quick trip to PC World will reveal rows of high-end graphics cards sporting £300 or more price tags. Not everyone needs such brute force though and for us mere mortals who want a good sharp image and something a bit quicker than the graphics card that came supplied with their PC, the Crucial Radeon 7500 could be the answer.
Setting Up
Inside the box is the Radeon 7500 itself, a driver CD and surprisingly at this price, an s-video lead for the TV-Out connector. Installation is simply a case of uninstalling any existing video drivers, removing the old graphics card, plugging in the Radeon 7500 and loading the new drivers.
The first sample of the 7500 had a slight glitch. After emailing Crucial's tech support and trying their suggestions failed to fix the problem they swapped it out for a new one which worked perfectly. We have to say, having dealt with a fair few tech support lines in the past, Crucial's was fast and their suggestions were very good. Many just offer fairly useless generic solutions but the response from Crucial indicated a real grasp of Radeon driver issues. Top marks to them for that and their speed.
We have always liked the general image quality with Radeon based cards and find the output noticeably crisper than most other chipsets. On both a 17inch tube monitor and a TFT screen the quality was excellent and everything we've come to expect from a Radeon.
Features
As well as the usual video monitor output, the 7500 has a TV-out feature via an s-video connector. This is useful for playing games on a big TV as well as movies. A generous 64Mb of DDR RAM is supplied which should be able to cope with most current games and their texture needs. The card has a heatsink but no fan which may be important if you require a quiet PC.
It would be churlish to expect a £40 card to compete with the latest and greatest but despite its budget roots, the card plays most games more than adequately. You're not going to get 200fps Quake speeds but speed wise it comes very close to say a GeForce3 Ti500. We tested the game heavily using games like Microsoft's Excellent Dungeon Siege and Combat Flight Simulator. The frame rates were more than good enough whilst retaining the usual excellent Radeon video quality. This card effectively fits in between say a GeForce 4 MX and Radeon 9000 Pro speed wise. Unlike many graphics cards, the Radeon's don't tend to slow down as much at higher resolutions so if you want to play games at 1280x1024 you'll find the 7500 holds its own even better compared to more expensive cards.
If you watch DVDs on your PC you'll benefit from the 7500's hardware assisted DVD playback which improves the image as well as speeds up the image processing. The latter can be especially useful if your PC's CPU is a bit on the slow side.
It is worth pointing out here that ATI (who provide the Radeon 7500 chipset) historically were not too good at getting stable drivers out but in recent times they have put a lot of effort in to improving this area and it shows. The ease of installation and stability are now second to none.
The drivers offer lots of tweaking and settings to play with to help you get the most from the card. If you like to tinker further then there are third party utilities available on the web to take this even further.
Conclusion
At a mere £40.99 that includes UK shipping, this is a great card. It's not the fastest thing around, far from it. What your money buys you though is top-notch video quality and a card which offers a good step up for ordinary folks without breaking the bank. As such it comes recommended.
