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ASUS RADEON 9600XT, Some Technical Details

One thing that sets apart the ASUS version of the RADEON 9600XT from the rest of the bunch is the presence of the ATI Rage theater multimedia chip. Briefly, the Rage Theater is a high quality integrated video encoder / decoder with digital audio support, quite possibly the best in the business for this type of application. The adaptive comb filter and advanced on-chip circuitry ensures that Composite and S-Video analog inputs in NTSC, PAL, and SECAM format are converted into high quality, low noise digital video with superb image quality. At the same time, the Rage Theater chip supports video modes from 320 x 200 to 800 x 600, along with a full range of VBI services, including Teletext, Closed Captioning, and Intercast.

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Top view, front view and close-up of the heatspreaders at the back-end of the 9600XT that are extruded to show the ASUS brand name. It is almost a shame that in most cases even with a window case, hardly anyone can see the "top" of the graphics adapter since it usually points down, thence, the beauty in the detail solution will be lost on most

      

   

The ATI Rage Theater chip is a prominent feature of the ASUS series of RADEON cards. Memory used in this case are Samsung 4 M x 32 components rated at 700 MHz data rate (-GC2A suffix)

Aside from the salmon-colored soldermask, the PCB is rather uneventful.

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