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This card can be great for any SOHO situation, and for $69CDN is well worth it. Occasional gamers and DVD also fly on this 16MB card. Read more to find out how QIII performs!!
75% Rating: 
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Pine Savage 4 |
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Installation and Benchmarks
Installation of this video card is pretty much standard fare. As per the
usual, I changed my video adapter mode / driver to "Standard PCI Adapter." I
then uninstalled the Nvidia Drivers from "Add / Remove Programs" from the
Control Panel. Next I shut off the painful box. Slid open the side panel,
removed the Asus V6800, then popped in the Pine, then turned the box back on. I
had extracted the driver files to a directory, so when Windows detected the new
video card, I simply typed in the directory. Needless to say, installation was
easy.
DVD:
I tested the cards' ability to playback DVD (The Matrix, using WinDVD 2000.)
I must say that this card does a really decent job of playing back DVD. Using a
desktop resolution of 1024x768 @ 32bit provided smooth playback with only the
occasional glitch. FYI, I was running ICQ, WinAmp, and MIRC, in the background
whilst playing the movie.
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Here are the Quake III and 3D Mark 2000 benchmarks for the gamer
on a budget: |
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Resolution |
FASTEST |
FAST |
NORMAL |
HIGH QUALITY |
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512*384 |
129 FPS |
87.2 FPS |
79 FPS |
79 FPS |
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640*480 |
93.1 FPS |
60.1 FPS |
53.9 FPS |
53 FPS |
You can see the Geforce DDR Scores here.
As you can plainly see, the Geforce DDR is a lot faster than the Pine Savage 4GT,
especially once you begin to raise the environment details and resolution. Then again,
the Geforce DDR goes for at least $345 CDN ($233 USD.). As a matter of fact, I
even tried fragging with the Savage 4GT at 512x384 w/ FASTEST settings, and it
wasn't that bad. The FPS was satisfactory, unfortunately the graphics quality
reminded me of the old Doom days. Nonetheless, nothing more can be realistically
expected from such a low priced video card.
3D MARK 2000: 1069 3D Marks for the Savage 4GT J
.
3D MARK 2000: 5674 3D Marks for the Geforce DDR J
.
CONCLUSION:
Once again, I must reiterate, this Pine Savage 4GT is
NOT intended for high-end gaming. It is however, a good value card
that can handle the vast
majority of your daily computing tasks, and offers light 3D acceleration for
occasional gaming. Remember 90+ FPS at 640x480 with such a cheap card is NOT bad
at all J
. Ultimately, if you were seriously
interested in Quake III scores, you wouldn't have only spent $69 CDN on a video
card now would you? I do however highly recommend this card for sOHO and light
multimedia systems as well as for users on a budget, because it is definitely superior to the vast majority of cards in its price range.
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