While everyone of us would love to own a high end card such as a Radeon 9800XT, the reality is that we can’t all afford to shell out $400+ to get the best. The bulk of the money made come from the sales of the mid to lower end cards. With that, we look at ATI’s mid range monster, the Radeon 9600XT.

The Radeon 9600XT, or the R360, is partially a speed bump over the Radeon 9600 Pro. It runs at 100MHz faster than the Radeon 9600 Pro, clocking in at 500MHz. Memory speed is at 300MHz or 600MHz DDR at 128bits wide. Four pipelines and two vertex engines round out the general specs of the card. As with the Radeon 9800XT, the 9600XT features a thermal diode used to monitor the temperature of the card. For overclockers, you can see how hot your card is running with the help of the diode.



Physically, the card’s length is pretty average. The card is built on the .13 micron process ensuring cooler operation and less power requirements. Because of the less power needed, there is no power connector like the Radeon 9600 Pro. Instead of the green PCB used in the Radeon 9600 Pro, the familiar red one appears on the Radeon 9600XT. 128MB of ram comes in the sample that was sent to us with 256MB models available also.

The card I was sent did have an announcement of a voucher for Half-Life 2 on the cover but none was sent with the sample. The DVI-VGA converter was also missing but I’m positive you’ll find the two in ATI’s offering.

We didn’t have a comparable card from NVIDIA here to test so I’ll just show you how fast it is compared to the 9800XT at almost double the price. We’ll see if the price versus performance is really all that.
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