Meh, the 9800's architecture wasn't bad for it's time, but the card's design couldn't live up to it's performance. The heatsink for the VPU (ATI calls it a VPU while nVIDIA calls it a GPU) is puny and the fan is useless. The RAM chips run hot because they decided that the puny aluminum heatsink would only cover the VPU. but not the RAM chips. Other than that, the 9800 Pro was a very good card back then.