Customer Reviews

Diamond Stealth S120 Radeon 9550 256 MB GPU

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I installed this in a Windows Vista Ultimate system and Vista automatically downloaded and installed the latest driver. I have Aero Glass running and the performance rating is in the 4.x range. Also, the Diamond version of this card has an onboard fan to minimize the heat (the ATI version doesn't). Also, Media Center works really well under this card.

I bought this mainly so that I could run Microsoft Robotics Studio simulator. Anything less than an ATI 9400 specs. will not run the simulator due a lack of shaders which the 9550 has. After I installed the card the simulator ran great and I've been very happy with it. The 3D graphics run without any choking and I'm running it on a 1GHz PC with 512MB RAM. I would definitly recommend this card.

I bought this card for my husband for Christmas. Now, he LOVES the performance and it made his Tiger Woods 2007 golf game look GREAT! So much so, that I am rather envious as it doesn't look anywhere near as nice on my computer which has an Nvidia GeForce FX 5200!

The one reason I give it 4 stars is that from the reviews and from the PICTURE posted here on Amazon, I thought it would have a cooling fan. It does not, or at least the one we received from Tiger Direct does not. It has a heat sink instead. So if you must have a cooling fan, realize that sometimes this product ships with a heat sink.

That said, there has been no problem with the card through lack of a cooling fan, the heat sink seems to work just fine and my husband often spends hours on his computer.

My husband has a home built system, running Windows XP Home SP1.


Update 9/16/2008:

Well, the lack of a cooling fan has not been a problem. The card has been running without a single hitch or glitch. I'm sorry I didn't give it 5 stars instead of 4.

I have had this card for about a week now and it works perfect. I bought Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and it wouldnt work on my computer because I didnt look at the required graphics card. But I bought this card and it made the game run smoothly. The only thing is I can't get 128bit color, only up to 32 bit. Maybe it's just my computer and I dont know how to activate it. I have an HP Pavilion 7955, P4, 1.5Mhz, 512RAM >_<.) I paid [...] and after the [...] rebate from Tiger Direct, its a superb deal.

I bought this video card since i didnt have one.
I was using windows ME and found a download for the driver that is ME compatible even though not included on the CD. However you wont get all the features as with Win XP.
I later upgraded to win XP and was able to open the drivers from the CD that came with the video card and was able to see all the features (although i dont know how to maximize most of them).
Someone else said they were able to get the card to work with vista so I upgraded to vista. there is a driver included on the cd for vista but you have to search for it as it doesnt load automatically and you even get an error when inserting the installation disk.
when i was using win Xp, I downloaded a program to check compatibilty with Vista. the program found that card doesnt have some of the minimum features to get the the most advanced features of vista. Therefore if you want the most advanced features of vista, you shouldnt get this card as it will eventually be obsolete. However the basic features of Vista do work.

This card is a good basic graphic card if u have all the requirements for it

Contrary to other reviews I found that this card works fine with Windows Vista, but also contrary to other reviews I hate the fact that it has a fan rather than a heat sink. My once virtually silent desktop now has an extraordinarily annoying high-pitched screech. If I can't come up with a way to silence this thing I will have to remove it.

I bought this to upgrade my computer but this card was too slow and needed more power to make it useful in my computer. So I returned it.

I recently bought this product to ensure that my vista upgrade will provide the ability to use Aero. I am not a gamer and hence this review will probably not cover any of those aspects....
Vista Aero definitely worked pretty nicely. However, for reasons unrelated to this card (I certainly know that the card was not the problem since I had a printer that I really needed to use and could not get it to work with Vista), I had to downgrade back to XP. Luckily I had the old hard drive with XP that I just reconnected. XP before I upgraded was using the ATI 9250 card, and so now when I loaded it again it had to install the 9550 drivers. Right after I did this, windows media player was just not able to play any video file without any choppiness. I played around with some of the hardware acceleration settings, and was able to play wmv, and MPGs, but no matter what I did, AVI playback was horrendous. So I had to take it out and go back to my old 9250 and everything was working fine. I did try the latest drivers from ATI, but nothing helped. This may be a problem related to my configuraton, but I just wanted to mention it. This is an excellent card for the price, and I think it is a good deal for anybody that is looking for a cheap alternative to reach the specs that vista needs.

Windows VISTA and this card do NOT work well together. Especially if you are performing an upgrade from WinXP to Windows Vista. I repeatedly found system lockup errors and got absolutely no help from ATI Radeon. In fact they wanted to blame my system, not their drivers. If you are going to be using Windows VISTA, DO NOT buy this card.