ATi are laying down the same game plan set by nVIDIA many years back, releasing new VPUs every six to eight months. The Radeon 9800 Pro VPU was released seven months after the highly successful Radeon 9700 Pro and the upcoming 'R420' is on course for a late September release. The Radeon 9800 Pro VPU is really nothing more than a higher clocked 'R300' core that has been tweaked for just a bit more performance. We'll get into the specifics in a moment, but as you're about to see it really does improve performance nicely. In any event, the highly successful Radeon 9800 Pro we are examining now came to market from an unlikely source - Crucial, a division of Micron, and a tier one memory manufacturer. Crucial ventured into the highly competitive world of videocards in the summer of 2002, originally releasing a Radeon 8500LE. Their videocard caused quite a stir in the hardware community due to the use of 6ns DRAM, however the performance of the card was not able to live up to expectations. Crucial appear to have improved on their mistakes, and the Crucial Radeon 9700 Pro was one of the better 9700 Pro's on the market due to its more competitive price and awesome warranty. Today we'll be checking out Crucial's new Radeon 9800 Pro videocard. The same questions arise; does this card live up to the Crucial name and expectations? You'll just have to read on to find out!