Just because the PowerColor Radeon 9250 is best suited for 2D rendering doesn't mean we're going to spare it from our overclocking and customary benchmark tests.

And so, with the core clocked at 240 MHz by default we slowly raised the clock speed a few MHz at a time... Remarkably, without any form of active cooling the little ATI GPU was easily able to crack the 300 MHz mark, before finally topping out at 346 MHz. Not a bad overclock at all from a budget card with a tiny passive heatsink!

The 5ns Mira memory was already clocked at its theoretical maximum limit of 200 MHz, but was able to reach up to 221 MHz with a little coaxing. For the following benchmarks we were able to run both the core and memory at their maximum overclocked while running the overclocked portion of the benchmarks.

PCStats Test System Specs:

system 1 system 2 processor: intel pentium 4 540 intel pentium 4 3.0c clock speed: 16 x 200 mhz = 3.2 ghz 15 x 200 mhz = 3.0 ghz motherboards: gigabyte 8anxp-d, i925x gigabyte 8knxp, i875p videocard: gigabyte gv-rx60x128v gigabyte gv-nx57128d msi pcx5750-td128 albatron trinity pc5900 ati radeon 9800xt ati radeon 9800 pro ati radeon 9700 pro asus radeon 9600xt msi fx5950 ultra-td128 msi fx5900u-vtd256 msi fx5900xt-vtd128 aopen geforcefx 5900xt powercolor radeon 9250 memory: 2x 256mb crucial pc4300 ddr2 2x 256mb corsair twinx 3200ll hard drive: 40gb wd special ed 40gb wd special ed cdrom: msi x48 cd-rw/dvd-rom nec 52x cd-rom powersupply: vantec stealth 470w vantec stealth 470w software setup windowsxp build 2600 intel inf 5.02.1012 forceware 61.77 windowsxp build 2600 intel inf 5.02.1012 catalyst 4.6 detonator 61.77 benchmarks 3dmark2001se codecreatures aquamark aquamark3 x2 the threat ut2003 doom 3

the agp and pci-e systems are different, but the results are being included for reference. no aa/af tests were run.

3DMark2001SE	Source: FutureMark

By combining DirectX8 support with completely new graphics, it continues to provide good overall system benchmarks. 3DMark2001SE has been created in cooperation with the major 3D accelerator and processor manufacturers to provide a reliable set of diagnostic tools. The suite demonstrates 3D gaming performance by using real-world gaming technology to test a system's true performance abilities. Tests include: DirectX8 Vertex Shaders, Pixel Shaders and Point Sprites, DOT3 and Environment Mapped Bump Mapping, support for Full Scene Anti-aliasing and Texture Compression and two game tests using Ipion real-time physics.