The heatsink on the Gigabyte GV-R96X128D's ATI 'RV360' VPU is a bit on the small side compared to the monsters used with current Nvidia cards. Since the Radeon 9600XT core is built with 0.13 micron manufacturing technology, less heat is produced because individual transistors are smaller.

Unlike the more expensive Radeon VPUs, the 9600XT core is actually not protected with a metal shim around the edge of the FCPGA chip. If you're planning to install a larger third party heatsink like the Zalman HP-80A this is good news. Remember to be careful otherwise you could chip a corner off the brittle silicon core however.

Those of you with case windows should like the deep blue glow given off by the Gigabyte GV-R96X128D's fan. The fan is pretty much silent under power, and that is certainly an advantage of most Nvidia graphics cards on the store shelves these days.

If you have an older PC, please keep in mind that while this is a mainstream videocard, the Gigabyte GV-R96X128D is not 2x AGP compatible! There's no 2x AGP key, and any attempt to make it fit will probably just result in a fried motherboard once you turn the system on.

How about a little Overclocking on the side?

Despite the 0.13 micron manufacturing process the core is built with, the Radeon 9600XT VPU didn't seem to have much in the way of headroom. Starting at 500 MHz we slowly raised the core speed of the Gigabyte GV-R96X128D a few MHz at a time. To my surprise the RV360 core seemed to have a lot of legroom as it passed 550 MHz very easily. In the end it ran 602 MHz with the stock cooler. Now that is quite a feat!

The 128MB of DDR memory on the Gigabyte GV-R96X128D are based on the same 2.8ns Samsung DRAMs we find on other Radeon 9700 Pro/9800 Pro videocards, but for some reason I was expecting more conservative results from them. Starting at 200 MHz the memory overclocked to a mere 327 MHz.

Unlike most other ATi based videocards we've tested, the Gigabyte GV-R96X128D's core and memory did not play nicely together. In order to run both the core and memory overclocked we had to lower the core speed to 587 MHz.

PCStats Test System Specs:

processor: intel pentium 4 3.0c clock speed: 15 x 200 mhz = 3.0 ghz motherboards: gigabyte 8knxp, i875p videocard: ati radeon 9800 pro ati radeon 9700 pro gigabyte radeon 9600 pro msi fx5900u-vtd256 albatron geforcefx 5600 ultra (rev2) msi g4ti4600-vt2d8x gigabyte gv-r96x128d memory: 2x 256mb corsair twinx 3200ll hard drive: 40gb wd special ed cdrom: nec 52x cd-rom powersupply: vantec stealth 470w software setup windowsxp build 2600 intel inf 5.03 catalyst 3.9 detonator 52.16 workstation benchmarks 3dmark2001se 3dmark03 aquamark aquamark3 codecreatures gun metal 2 quake iii arena ver 1.17 ut2003 aa test, af and aa+af test 3dmark2001se quake iii arena