HIS Radeon 9600XT Video Card

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!