A-Trend also fails to deliver in other areas in which they could make a "more bang for your buck" type product. The drivers are very lackluster and the only utility given is a taskbar icon that allows you to pull up the display control panel - hardly what we would consider a feature.

There seem to be some bugs with Quake3 and the default drivers, causing graphical glitches when switching resolutions from within the game. Also, upon loading the game, everything is visible, but after a few seconds, the gamma correction "feature" kicks in, lowering the gamma to unacceptable levels.

With the only apparent difference from the Diamond Stealth being the RAM speed, we would expect a small price decrease in the A-Trend card. After all, 125MHz RAM is still cheaper than 143MHz RAM and why would you switch and take the performance hit if it didn't save money?

The end result of the slower RAM is a slower overall card, while not helping the price seemingly at all. Unacceptable in today's competitive market.

We ran this card at its default speed of 125/125 compared against a 125/143 clocked Diamond Stealth III S540. Vsync was disabled despite its tendency to make games unplayable on Savage4 based video cards due to flickering.

Check out our results…

Here are the details for the test rig we utilized:

Abit BE6 Mainboard
EMS 128MB PC-133 HSDRAM
A-Trend ATC3970 Savage4 Pro 32MB AGP 2D/3D Accelerator
Diamond Stealth III S540 Savage4 Pro+ 32MB AGP 2D/3D Accelerator
Seagate 7,200 UDMA 33 HD
ABIT Hot Rod UDMA 66 PCI Controller Card
Sound Blaster Live! PCI Sound card
Creative Labs PC-DVD Encore 2X IDE DVD-ROM
Win98

Test Conditions and Specifications: All tests were run a total of four times with the results averaged to determine final score. VSync was OFF for all video tests, allowing maximum frame rate performance.