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ASUS RADEON 9600XT

To tell the truth, we had the ASUS 9600XT before we had a chance to look at any other RADEON 9600 XT, we have used it for a few months now and grown very fond of this card. As opposed to the Sapphire Ultimate RADEON 9600 Edition, the ASUS version relies on conventional active cooling of the GPU and also of the memory on the front face of the card. The backside of the ASUS 9600XT does not feature any cooling provisions, which should be ok since the memory does not run that hot to begin with and, moreover, the "clamshell" arrangement of two memory BGA chips across the PCB could actually be used to transfer heat across the latter, meaning that cooling on one side might suffice. In reality, with most current DDR devices, heat is no longer a real problem, at least not under standard operating conditions.

Redline

   

Front and back faces of the shipping box of the RADEON 9600 XT.

      

       

Instead of the translucent plastic, ASUS uses a white cardboard box with an anti-static foam compartment for the actual card and separate compartments for the break-out box and the CD container holding the entire software bundle.

Software Bundle

The software bundled wtih the ASUS RADEON 9600XT is basically the same as what is shipped with the 9800XT and includes a game sampler with Splinter Cell, WarcraftIII, Big Mutha Truckers, Breed, Colin McRae Rally3 and TOCA Race Drivers as well as full versions of Gunmetal and Battle Engine. Other utilities are ASUS DVD, PowerDirector Pro 2.55 ME, Medi@Show SE 2.0 and Ulead Cool3D SE 3.0.

The real kick with respect to software is what is found on the driver and utilities CD with ASUS Twain drivers, WDM capture, Smart Doctor, Video Security, ASUS digital VCR and GameFace 1.2. We have described all of these utilities in detail in our review of the ASUS RADEON 9800XT, especially the digital VCR is an extremely cool feature, so you might check out the details there.

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