video capture and editing devices

I previously purchased a VisionTek Ti500 for $400 when it first came out.

Within a few months, the fan failed and the card overheated. Rather then send me an RMA, they sent me a new fan without any instructions on how to replace it - it was no straightforward and the install chipped a ceramic on the board.

They replaced it with another card whose heatsink simply fell off of the card.

When I requested an RMA, they said that VisionTek had gone bankrupt and that they were the new VisionTek who was not required to honor the warranty. They offered me an upgrade option with several cards - all but one resulted in a higher price for the upgrade then to buy the card at Best Buy.

I offered them to exchange me their lowest-priced upgrade card, which would have cost me $40 (mind you, my original card was $400), or I would escalate and FedEx the company CEO at the following address:

Hartford Computer group, 1610 Colonial Parkway, Inverness, IL 60067

and post my experience on online store reviews.

They failed to respond in 2 days, so here is the result.

Please note that I am neither advising or dissuading anyone from buying their cards, but simply posting a truthful and unbiased account of my experience with VisionTek.

I've been a consistent ATI graphics card user from "way back", since the old ISA based VGA Wonder and Graphics Ultra Pro days, circa 1988. ATI has never let me down in reliability, compatibility, and sheer performance. ATI's video chipsets always seem to be the best and most stable performers on the market. I purchased the Radeon 9800 Pro card as a replacement to a newly purchased Radeon 9700 Pro, which is now running top notch in my wife's Athlon 64 3200+ machine. The Radeon 9800 Pro's AGP 8x interface and Direct 9.0 compatibility makes this graphics card a top-notch graphics and gaming performer. The card has its own power plug instead of drawing power from the AGP slot, the first such setup I've seen. When I saw that, I knew I was on to something special in performance. The graphics board is an outstanding performer and the drivers seem compatible with all my software under Win 2000. MPEGS, streaming video, web browsing, scanning and modifying JPEGS, and games just seem to fly around the screen. I plan to buy a 3-D game soon and check out that aspect of the card's performance. I did have some problems loading ATI's Linux Redhat drivers for the card. Redhat natively sees the card as something entirely different (VESA graphics card, 128 Mb). But the card works just fine in Linux, in spite of not having dedicated drivers, so it's not a big deal to me right now.

Its amazing how the nvidia fans jump on here and knock the Radeon Series. I bought this card when it first came out. Smokes nvidia in image quality, and yes I tried the 5900 Ultra, the FX cards are no more than a hopped up GF 4 Ti with DX 9 capabilities..the funny thing is, Half Life 2 wont be able to use AA and AF with the FX line....LOL. Get a grip. Radeon = Mature Adults that like great picture quality. Nvidia = Kids that like the little butterfly on nvidias web site. 8)