ATI Radeon LE 32MB DDR

Conclusion

With a price lower than all but 2 video cards on this week's price guide, the ATI Radeon LE is by all means a budget video card. Although only available on-line, the brown box that the Radeon LE comes in is sure to please even those not necessarily looking for a budget video card.

Out of the box, the Radeon LE's performance is respectable, considering the price. The card barely outperformed the Radeon SDR in many of our tests, giving it a slight edge. This also left the card performing very close, if not higher, than NVIDIA's budget solution, the GeForce2 MX and MX 400 which runs for about $75 in a 32MB configuration. One thing that the Radeon LE has that the other cards in this price range do not is potential.

The potential of the Radeon LE is huge. Simply overclocking the card provided huge speed increases that could not be matched by overclocking the other cards. In addition, adding 3 simple strings to the registry provided huge gains in our D3D benchmark, Unreal Tournament. When overclocked to the 183MHz mark, the Radeon LE performed identically to the Radeon DDR in OpenGL games, showing that not only is the HyperZ component of the Radeon is present on the Radeon LE, it is also functioning. Although disabled in DirectX, that is easy to overcome with the aforementioned registry keys. Performing these tweaks leaves the Radeon LE trouncing all other "budget" cards.

A great value, there are some caveats to the Radeon LE. First off, overclocking success will undoubtedly vary. One must keep in mind that the Radeon LE cores are actually Radeon DDR cores that did not meet spec. This means that the chip on your Radeon LE may or may not hit speeds of 183MHz. In addition, the memory is only speced to 166MHz, so this provides another limitation in hitting the 183MHz mark. Rest assured that the vast majority of Radeon LE cards out there will overclock some above the very conservative 148MHz that they ship at. To what extent the card will overclock is really luck of the draw.

The second item to remain cautious of is a problem that is present in the whole Radeon series: the Radeon drivers. As we saw in our ATI vs NVIDIA: Driver performance under Win98 & Win2K article, the Radeon drivers are not up to par. Add to this the problem we encountered while running Synetic's Mercedes-Benz Truck Racing demo on the drivers we got from ATI's site and it is clear that the Radeon driver set is still not up to par.

As it turns out, the Radeon LE may be the perfect video card for the gamer looking to spend less that $100 on a card. If you are a user who does not mind taking risks, risks with both driver problems and problems hitting high overclocked speeds, than the Radeon LE is ideal for you. Plus, you can rest assured that the Radeon LE you just bought will perform at the same level or better as the comparably priced Radeon SDR, only with a lot more potential.