Overclocker Cafe - HIS Excalibur 9600XT-VIVO

H.I.S. Excalibur Radeon 9600XT - VIVO Edition

What you get

Along with the driver CD, we've got the S-Video cable, composite cable and DVI/VGA converter gizmo. Thankfully, H.I.S. is one of the companies that continues to include the Half-Life2 game coupon in their package. The manual is bit bare but adequate.

The extra CD's contain PowerDVD 5, Power Director Pro and a 5-in-1 game pack. The game pack includes Vietcong, Railroad Pioneer, Neighbors from Hell, Tropico 2 and Aquanox 2. As soon as I'm done with the review, I'm gonna pop Aquanox 2 in and give it a shot. I love the Aquamark benchmark but I've never had the chance to play the game it's based on until now:)

Card layout

H.I.S. stays true to the basic reference design of the ATi cards but have added a few extra features.

The most notable being the heatsink for the GPU. Gold and silver in color, the company's logo is stamped in blue to match the lighted fan. Oh, did I forget to mention that? Yup, the fan lights up when powered. I just love tricked out stuff!

Another item which sets the H.I.S. card apart from the field is the inclusion of heatsinks on the memory. While I haven't read every 9600XT review out there, the ones with memory sinks are definitely few and far between.

Heatsinks are also applied to the back of the memory. If you remember in the specifications, the memory on this card is not running at the standard 600MHz but it has boosted to 650MHz. With a 50MHz boost, the sinks are needed to keep things cool.

Controlling the VIVO option is the ATi Rage Theatre chip. The VIVO option is a pretty nice feature. It allows you to connect a VCR, camcorder, or external DVD player to the card and watch the videos or even record them on your PC. While most people now do have DVD drives in their machines, I like the ability to capture my old VCR movies easily.

Another nice option that I haven't personally seen on a video card is the ability to support different broadcast video standards. While here in the US, we use the NTSC standard, other countries use PAL.

An onboard jumper allows you to set it to the standard where you live. Attention to detail is always a plus in my book.

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