Graphics Card: Closer Look

The design of the print circuit board hasn’t changed since the All-In-Wonder 9600 PRO and that’s no surprise – the RV360 doesn’t differ from the previous value chip in anything, save for the clock rate.

The old PCB worked well, so there was no sense for the manufacturers to spend money and effort for inventing anything new.

The only difference of the new model from the older GeCube card is the cooler: the small heatsink with a noisy fan is now replaced with a serious construction equipped with a spout case. The ribbed surface of the heatsink is right above the graphics core, while the fan is placed higher and blows air through the ribs. That’s not a novelty as coolers go, but still quite an efficient solution. Moreover, the big heatsink implies noiseless cooling. And really, the fan was practically silent, but provided enough cooling for the GPU. The cooler is fastened to the board by means of two spring clips – its size and weight don’t require additional fastening.

Against our expectations, the heatsink doesn’t cool down the memory chips, although this could have been easily realized. As it is, we have a gap between the heatsink and the four chips on the front side of the PCB. The chips on the backside of the card are not cooled either. Still, you don’t have to worry about them – they remain just warm at work.

A nice feature that we first saw in the All-In-Wonder RADEON 9600 PRO is available in the new card, too. It is an internal connector for linking to an internal audio input of the audio card or the mainboard. This frees the external Line-In socket, to which you may want to attach rear satellites or central/subwoofer channels of your multi-channel speaker system. In order to use that connector, you should select the appropriate input of the audio card (mainboard) during the initial setup of the ATI Multimedia Center; otherwise, you won’t hear anything. The input you need is usually called “Auxiliary”, but you can also use a “CD Audio” input since modern PCs send a digital signal along the IDE bus during playback of music CDs.

The graphics processor works at 525MHz on this card, and the memory from Samsung is clocked at 325 (650DDR) MHz. There’s a slight overclocking above the regular clock rates of the RADEON 9600 XT, but it’s not too big to give any significant advantage to the GeCube card. We tried the card at real overclocking, too. Using RivaTuner and extensive external blowing we sped the card up to 625/390MHz. ATI’s 0.13-micron tech process with new dielectric materials brings its fruit!