The déjà vu feeling is hard to shake off: this graphics card resembles both RADEON 9600 PRO and RADEON 9700 PRO at the same time! Just take a look here:

As you see, it is the big square-shaped heatsink that makes the new graphics card look like the ex-flagship of the high-end series from ATI. Here, though, the heatsink is white and is equipped with a different fan. It is natural that we see another, more efficient cooling solution compared to the RADEON 9600 PRO, since the 500MHz frequency requires it. The heatsink is fastened by means of two stiff springy clamps. The ordinary yellow “gum” serves as a thermal interface between the cooler’s foot and the die surface. This might not be the best heat-conducting material in this world, but it does its job quite well and protects the die edges against clipping. The fan is quite noiseless, by the way.

Otherwise, the PCB is nearly identical to the one of the RADEON 9600 PRO, although some components are missing. To my regret, the engineers from ATI Technology once again forgot to mount heatsinks onto the memory chips. On the other hand, the memory frequency remained the same, 600MHz (300MHz DDR), and the memory chips don’t heat up too much. The graphics card uses memory chips from Samsung with an access time of 3.3ns. The access time is rather high; we cannot hope for any rewarding overclocking. There are 128MB of memory with the 128bit memory bus. The card we got for our tests is just a sample, so it doesn’t make much sense to talk about its accessories and package. I would like to say one thing concerning the 2D quality, though: our display had crispy graphics and text in all resolutions up to 1600x1200@85Hz. The picture became a bit fuzzy in 1800x1440, but this was not a standard resolution for our display.

ATI Overdrive: Not Now…

The main idea behind the dynamic overclocking technology from ATI, called Overdrive, is quite simple: R360 and RV360 graphics processors are equipped with an built-in thermal diode to track the core temperature. If the core is cool, the driver can increase its frequency to a definite value. In case of overheating, the frequency is dropped down. As for the RADEON 9600 XT, the core may function at 500, 513 or 527MHz, but the current version of the Catalyst driver supports Overdrive for RADEON 9800 XT cards only. Overdrive for RADEON 9600 XT cards is promised to appear in the next version of the Catalyst.