ATi Radeon 9600XT Review

The card comes in the standard ATi box, which has a cool picture on the front and some features on the side and back, with the back mostly taken up by pictures of Half-Life 2. The card comes with a voucher for a copy of Half-Life 2 (or at least will with your card, mine was lacking in the Half-Life 2 department). Check it out:

What’s in the box, you may ask? Well, not a whole lot. It comes with the card, the manual, an installation CD, and a coupon for Half-Life 2 (for you, not me). Anyways, here are some pictures of the contents:

The card itself is nice looking, with the trademark red ATi PCB stylings. It has a small heatsink/fan set-up, which is nice and small and won’t block any PCI slots. It also doesn’t have a connector for external power like my Radeon 9700 does, so you don’t have to run a floppy power connector to it.

The card has one VGA output connector for your standard CRT display, one DVI-I for a flat-panel or CRT displa (using an adapter, not included) and one S-Video output for sending movies or games to your TV. You can also enable HDTV output with a special connector from ATi (not included).

Now that we’ve taken a look at it, let’s see how it handles some games, since a card is no good if it sucks at gaming.