ATI RADEON 9600 XT

The fastest of ATI’s processors in the mainstream sector is represented in this review by a graphics card from ASUS:

ASUS is true to itself: the wiring of the graphics card differs from the reference design. The card supports VIVO functionality and has hardware monitoring tools (you can keep track of the GPU temperature, voltage and fan rotation speed). Intelligent control over the fan speed is supported. There’s a full set of cables and adapters and a pile of CDs enclosed with the card. There are 128MB of DDR SDRAM memory in BGA chips from Samsung with a cycle time of 3.3ns (Samsung K4D263238E-GC33). The nominal frequencies of the graphics processor and the memory chips on the A9600XT/TVD graphics cards from ASUS are 500/600 (300DDR) MHz.

This device was not willing to overclock, especially its memory. The maximum clock rates at which the A9600XT/TVD worked stably were 560/680MHz. This shouldn’t be a surprise, because the memory chips are rated for working at 600MHz at maximum and the cooler covers only the chips on the face side of the PCB.

ATI RADEON 9600 PRO

The RADEON 9600 PRO GPU appeared earlier than the higher-performing RADEON 9600 XT and headed the mainstream chip series from ATI for a while. After the RADEON 9600 XT came out – it was in fact a slightly improved and “officially overclocked” version of the RADEON 9600/9600 PRO – graphics cards on the RADEON 9600 PRO went down in price.

This graphics processor came to us on a graphics card from Sapphire:

This card looks less imposing than the one from ASUS: an unassuming cooler, no additional cooling for the memory chips, the Rage Theater chip that supports Video-In is missing…

The nominal clock rates fully comply with the standard: 400/600 (300DDR) MHz. The card carries 128MB of graphics memory in relatively fast BGA chips from Samsung with a cycle time of 2.85ns (Samsung K4D26323RA-GC2A) and a rated operational frequency of 700MHz.

Overclocking brought ambiguous results: 425/720MHz (GPU/memory). That is, the graphics processor wouldn’t speed up well, while the memory worked at a higher frequency than on the ASUS card. It is all clear with memory: Sapphire just uses faster chips. As for the GPU overclocking, I may have been unlucky to have a bad specimen. A better cooling system would also have helped to reach higher results. The first supposition is more probable, though, as in our previous review we overclocked a RADEON 9600 XT card from Sapphire (equipped with exactly the same cooler) to 625MHz GPU.