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Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT - 256mb The battleship gray aluminum cooler is your run of the mill active number. Typically, you will see this style of sink on the Northbridge chipset on several mainboard makes. What was surprising to us was that we found that Sapphire used silver thermal paste as its interface material.
Up close and personal with the 9600 XT VPU.
Most of the 128mb 9600 XT cards sport BGA memory. Our 256mb Sapphire 9600 XT has standard memory of the Samsung 3.3ns chip variety, giving us 300MHz (600MHz DDR).
Performance Our review today is not only on the card itself but from an angle of how much of a difference does the extra memory make. As a comparison card, we selected the Connect 3D Radeon 9600 XT (128mb). While I would have much rather preferred to use a 128mb Sapphire card to keep things as pure as possible. Unfortunately, we did not have one on hand. All the same, this should give us a good indication of what performance differences may exist between the 256mb and the 128mb BGA models of the 9600 XT. We used the Catalyst 4.1 driver for both cards. All displayed scores are the result of five runs per bench with the highest and lowest score being thrown out. The remaining three were then averaged and that is what you see here. The observed core and memory clock for the Sapphire 9600 XT were noted at 500MHz and 297MHz, barely slower than spec. Benchmarks Test Bed Page 1 - Introduction |
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