Legit Video Card Reviews

HIS Radeon 9600XT Video Card

Manufacturer: HIS
Product: Excalibur 9600XT Turbo Version Platinum Pack
Date: Tue, Jan 13, 2004 - 09:00 AM
Written By: Justin West -
Share:

The Card:


Front of card.		  
Back of card.

HIS has decided to stick with ATI's reference board design on the traditional red PCB. You can also see that HIS has taken into account the heat generated by the memory and has fastened heatsinks to all the memory modules. Another initial observation I made was that this card does not require any external power like many of nVidia's current products. HIS also added a little style to their core heatsink by including a blue LED near the clear-finned fan.


VGA, S-Out, and DVI ports		  
HIS 9600XT with blue LED on

Bottom of heatsink		  
The Core

The heatsink for this card seems to be pretty good and it was very quiet. HIS applied plenty of silver-based thermal compound to the GPU. I ran all the tests on the card before I removed the heatsink so you know how the card performs out of the box.

The picture of the core says Radeon 9600 XT and it looks like this core was manufactured during week 45 of 2003.

HIS has also informed me that they used Samsung IC's (part#: K4D263238E-GC2A) on the 9600XT. This memory is rated to 350MHz (700Mbps/pin). As you will see, HIS has clocked the memory to 650MHz on IC's that are rated at 700MHz which is up from the 600MHz standard for a 9600 XT card. I sense some potential Overclocking headroom! :) In case anyone is interested, this is the same IC that S3 used on their new Deltachrome S8 graphics card sample.

Moving on, let's find out how this card performs!

Next Page - Performance:


Review Index
Page 1 - Introduction:
Page 2 - The Card:
Page 3 - Performance:
Page 4 - Game Tests:
Page 5 - Image Quality: