Conclusion
All articles come to an end, so does this one. As you were able to witness the HiS Excalibur Radeon 9600XT Turbo is a pretty nice card to own. It's as advertised a mid-range performance graphics card; there aren't many games yet it can't handle. In fact I've just played the new Far Cry Demo without any issues whatsoever in 10x7 (no AA enabled), superb stability and excellent image quality, are also two words here that come to mind. The card is close and in some cases equal to the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra performance, overall the FX will win though, yet in upcoming DX9 titles the Radeon will definitely have the performance edge. But did you do what I asked you to do in the beginning of this article ? Indeed, do not rule out the same priced GeForce FX 5900 XT as in all cases is will flat out beat the entire 9600XT range.
The true power of this product is that it's 100% DirectX9 compatible and can render decently in such an environment. Feature wise it really is a nice product. For not an extreme amount of money, it has everything you want for the time being; CRT, SVideo & DVI-I outputs and do not forget really good DVD/Media playback and a crispy sharp 2D desktop.
Stability wise everything was peachy perfect on our test-platform, during the all test we did not notice artifacts or lockups. You can expect midlevel performance and an good set of features to date, you play all DirectX7 and 8 titles in 1280x1024x32 with good performance and you are able to play most games with features like 4X AA and 8x Anisotropic filtering while maintaining reasonable framerates in 1024x768x32. With DirectX 9 titles that on the other hand is a difference ballgame. Do not expect this card to crunch new DX9 titles. It's simply not powerful enough for it, but hey .. this is a mid-range product Guru's. So there you have the bottom line, it's a nice card for sure and thanks to it's faster memory it'll deliver you more bang for your bucks compared towards standard 9600 XT's.
The oneliner: What HiS produced here is a very interesting product, nice overclocking potential, at default equipped with faster memory compared to reference design, nice cooling and of course a decent software bundle with that additional Half-Life 2 coupon. Combine all that an you are looking at a very tasty product my friends.
Article update Feb 20 - 2004: HiS altered the name of this Turbo model's cooling unit. It's now called iCooler.
Excalibur Radeon 9600XT Turbo
Company: Hightech Information System
Website: www.hightech.com.hk
MSRP: $199.00
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