Date: December 17th, 2003
Article by: Roger (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited By: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: H.I.S.
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PRODUCT PICTORIAL & FEATURES

Here is a closeup of the 0.13 micron Radeon 9600SE chip after the heatsink is removed. The main difference between the 9600 and the 9600SE is the memory bus is 128bit with the 9600 and the 9600SE is 64bit.

Here is a shot of the back of the card. You can see the memory on the left. The memory consists of four 32megs chips with two being mountd on the top, and two on the bottom of the card.

The ATI Rage Theater chip for video playback and VIVO functions.

The fan/heatsink which covers the GPU is supposed to rate an impressively low 20 dBA. This is great if you value silence. Frankly, the GPU isn't likely to get hot enough to warrant a stronger fan.

I removed the fan/heatsink which didn't prove to be too difficult. It's held by plastic pins which pop through the card. I'd have liked to see something more solid, but again, you have to consider the price of the fan.

I was more disappointed (justifiably) with the heatsink. It was hard to snap a shot with my camera without having the flash bounce off of the metal. Still, I angled the heatsink just right, and increased the brightness via Photoshop so that you could see the marks on the bottom of the heatsink. Those scars will not help with heat dissipation. I replaced the heatsink using some Arctic Silver III.

By the way, you can see the pins that I was talking about in this shot.

Finally, here is the back of the card. DVI-I, S-Video and VGA. With the included adapter you can convert the one DVI output to a VGA if your want to run two analog monitors for some dual CRT monitor workstations.

Time to slap her into my testbed.