Crucial, a division of Micron, is a relatively new player to the graphics card game, with their first foray into the arena being a couple of years ago virtue of their ATi 8500 based card. As a launch partner of ATi, Crucial make a point of producing a package with one factor in mind – value for money. Inside the box you will not find 4 disks of bundled software, or free games, nor excessive fancy packaging. What you will find is an exact clone of the reference card, and an all-important lifetime warranty.
Inside the white box you will find a well protected card, an s-video Lead, a composite cable, a DVI-VGA adaptor and a full copy of PowerDVD in addition to a driver disk featuring the latest Catalyst drivers.
The memory on this card is Samsung 2.8ns wafer, qualified to run at 714MHz DDR. I was surprised to not see Micron (MT) memory on this card, but Samsung is excellent stuff, and is clocked at 680MHz, giving a little extra in the tank on the overclocking front.
Testing the Crucial card showed spot on results, exactly in line with what you would expect for a 9800 pro 128mb. Overclocking is obviously not high in the list of priorities in Crucial’s game-plan, and the retail cooler does it no favours. Our unmodded Crucial maxed out at 427.5 MHz on the clock and 366Mhz on the memory. Where this card does excel is in value for money: you can buy the Crucial 9800 Pro here for just £277.29 including tax. For a more indepth review on the crucial you can see our full review here.
