ATI RADEON 9600 - not many people will be buying a system with a video card inside the $ 500. And they do not pair it with a $ 1000 Pentium 4 "Extreme" Athlon64 or "FX". Although some people do, but we will leave foreigners alone.
Most of those seeking to upgrade their older video cards DX8 generation are probably looking to spend not much more than $ 200, if that. For the huge market segment, ATI 9600XT offers. Today we'll look at their box version, and next week we'll take a look at another brand that offers some additional features on top.
You can clearly see the results of the huge cross marketing agreement with Valve software right on the retail box. Not only ATI video cards "preferred" for Half Life 2 (which I find interesting because the game is far from being out yet), you can also get a free copy of Half Life 2! Well, not quite yet - you will have when the game ships, there is no official date yet. Ppople think it will be some time in April, but last summer we have been speculating for some time last December.
The card itself is the beautiful Red ATI RADEON 9600 used in all their range of retail products. Note that the more you need to connect an external power adapter, which is certainly a nice thing to have. There is no ramsinks, which until recently were nothing more than a show element. If you plan on overclocking this card, you would do yourself well to pick up some BGA RAM sinks.
The Specs
In the chart today, we are going against the 9600XT direct competition to his former, and it is a new direct competition - the GeForceFX 5700 Ultra and 5900XT respectively.
Clock Speed Basic Pixel Pipelines Fillrate Mpixel per second units Tex pipeline Mtexel Fillrate per second Speed Memory Bus Width memory bandwidth upGeForceFX 5700 Ultra 475 MHz 4 14.4 1900 1 1900 900 MHz 128-bit GB / sGeForceFX 5900XT 390 MHz in April 1560 2 3120 700 MHz 256-bit 22.4 GB / sRadeon 9600XT 500 MHz 4 2000 1 2000 600 MHz 128-bit 9.6 GB / s
As recently as 15 December 2003, we no 5900XT, 9600XT and would have been a better time to compete with the 5700 Ultra it. As you can see, the 9600XT beats the 5700 Ultra at the rate of filling, but shows a little memory bandwidth due to its memory speed crippled. But with the Controller of the 5900XT 256-bit memory, it easily handles both cards for around the same price.
So while we did not practice to compare the 5900XT 9600XT to keep in mind that will almost certainly be faster than the 5700 Ultra we comparing it to. We remind you at the end of the review as well.
Test
Here is the system used to test all video cards:
Processor: Pentium 4 3.2 GHzMotherboard: DFI LanParty 875RAM: 512MB DDR400 KingmaxHard Drive: Seagate Barracuda IV 80GB ATA100OS: WinXP SP1 and DirectX 9b
Drivers:ATI Catalyst 3.9 WHQL (certified)NVIDIA Detonator 53.03 WHQL (certified)
All publicly available benchmarks are available on our downloads page.
We did almost every test in three modes per card. These modes are those that most players will actually use when they play games.
1024x768 - To produce a real gaming environment will use many1600x1200 - To produce a high-resolution environment of the game (for you boys with the monitor size!)1024x768 w / 4xAA and 8x Aniso - a gaming environment for end users will use the highest ATI RADEON 9600
Most of those seeking to upgrade their older video cards DX8 generation are probably looking to spend not much more than $ 200, if that. For the huge market segment, ATI 9600XT offers. Today we'll look at their box version, and next week we'll take a look at another brand that offers some additional features on top.
You can clearly see the results of the huge cross marketing agreement with Valve software right on the retail box. Not only ATI video cards "preferred" for Half Life 2 (which I find interesting because the game is far from being out yet), you can also get a free copy of Half Life 2! Well, not quite yet - you will have when the game ships, there is no official date yet. Ppople think it will be some time in April, but last summer we have been speculating for some time last December.
The card itself is the beautiful Red ATI RADEON 9600 used in all their range of retail products. Note that the more you need to connect an external power adapter, which is certainly a nice thing to have. There is no ramsinks, which until recently were nothing more than a show element. If you plan on overclocking this card, you would do yourself well to pick up some BGA RAM sinks.
The Specs
In the chart today, we are going against the 9600XT direct competition to his former, and it is a new direct competition - the GeForceFX 5700 Ultra and 5900XT respectively.
Clock Speed Basic Pixel Pipelines Fillrate Mpixel per second units Tex pipeline Mtexel Fillrate per second Speed Memory Bus Width memory bandwidth upGeForceFX 5700 Ultra 475 MHz 4 14.4 1900 1 1900 900 MHz 128-bit GB / sGeForceFX 5900XT 390 MHz in April 1560 2 3120 700 MHz 256-bit 22.4 GB / sRadeon 9600XT 500 MHz 4 2000 1 2000 600 MHz 128-bit 9.6 GB / s
As recently as 15 December 2003, we no 5900XT, 9600XT and would have been a better time to compete with the 5700 Ultra it. As you can see, the 9600XT beats the 5700 Ultra at the rate of filling, but shows a little memory bandwidth due to its memory speed crippled. But with the Controller of the 5900XT 256-bit memory, it easily handles both cards for around the same price.
So while we did not practice to compare the 5900XT 9600XT to keep in mind that will almost certainly be faster than the 5700 Ultra we comparing it to. We remind you at the end of the review as well.
Test
Here is the system used to test all video cards:
Processor: Pentium 4 3.2 GHzMotherboard: DFI LanParty 875RAM: 512MB DDR400 KingmaxHard Drive: Seagate Barracuda IV 80GB ATA100OS: WinXP SP1 and DirectX 9b
Drivers:ATI Catalyst 3.9 WHQL (certified)NVIDIA Detonator 53.03 WHQL (certified)
All publicly available benchmarks are available on our downloads page.
We did almost every test in three modes per card. These modes are those that most players will actually use when they play games.
1024x768 - To produce a real gaming environment will use many1600x1200 - To produce a high-resolution environment of the game (for you boys with the monitor size!)1024x768 w / 4xAA and 8x Aniso - a gaming environment for end users will use the highest ATI RADEON 9600
