ATi Radeon 9600XT Review

Now we move on to the synthetic benchmarking suites provided by Futuremark. These give a good competitive score for each card, so that we can compare how the same tests run with two different cards differ. First up we have the older 3DMark2001SE, with the latest patch installed. With AA/AF disabled we get very impressive scores, over 10,000 at 1024×768, and we continue to get respectable scores all the way up the scale.

The scores are not as good when we turn on the AA/AF, but they are pretty good up to 1600×1200, where the score drops dramatically. Again I blame this drop on the memory interface not being able to handle being inundated with data.

Here we have 3DMark2003, which is the newest benchmark from Futuremark. This thing is meant to show you how your computer will play games that will be made in the near future, since as of right now I don’t think there are any games that stress your system to its limit like this benchmark. We see the same type of spread as before, with the 9600XT about 1000 points behind the 9700 almost all around. They both get killed running at the higher resolutions with AA/AF enabled, but that’s no surprise since I’m not aware of anything that will run everything in this suite perfectly at 30 frames per second with those kind of resolutions and options enabled.

So overall the 9600XT performed as it should, a little bit slower than the 9700 but still very respectably. If you buy one of these cards, you will know that you will be able to run most games that will come out for at least the next year, depending on your PC setup as well.

Conclusion

After running the Radeon 9600XT for a while in my machine I can say that this is a great card. It never crashed at all, even with the Overdrive option enabled, and gave great performance in all the games I play. Since I assume most people don’t run their games at 1600×1200 with 4x Antialiasing and 16x Anisotropic filtering turned on, I can heartily recommend this card to anyone who doesn’t want to blow $300 or more on a video card.

Online the cheapest I saw this card for was about $150, which is a great deal for this kind of power. I noticed that in the games that I play it never slowed down or hiccuped at all (except for Deus Ex: Invisible War, but that’s a problem with the game not being optimized, as it chokes my 9700 as well).

For any casual gamer considering this as opposed to the other offerings from nVidia like the 5200 would be better off to get this card, as it provides DirectX9 capabilities for new games (Half-Life 2, anyone?) and great power at a decent price. This card is also pretty quiet, especially compared to some other cards in its class.

I would recommend this card versus getting one from a third-party vendor, as I know from personal experience that ATi is really good with their customer support, and don’t give you too much hassle if the card breaks or gets damaged somehow. I give this card a 9 as well as the OCmodshop seal of approval.

Pros

• Quiet and unobtrusive
• Great performance in modern games
• Great value

Cons

• 128-bit memory bus holds it back
• No Half-Life 2 coupon for me