Radeon 9600 XT

This is probably the card that the market is really waiting for. The mainstream market is where the money is made, and this is also the card that most of us will be able to afford. The Radeon 9600 XT is based on the RV360 core (the V I’m guessing stands for Value), which replaces the RV350 core (Radeon 9600 Pro). With luck, this card will outperform the slightly disappointing Radeon 9600 Pro... ATI hopes so too - in spite of the 4 pipeline restriction, ATI feels that the increased clock speeds will bring place the 9600XT as the golden boy of the budget market once again.

The first major difference between this and the Radeon 9600 Pro is that there is no secondary power requirement. This feels like a luxury already, although it wasn’t so long ago that even the top cards did not require one. With no such requirement, the Radeon 9600 XT will be friendlier to weaker (read: generic) power supplies.

Surprisingly, the clockspeeds have not been finalized this close to release, but ATi states that the core will be running at 500+ mhz, and there will be 128 or 256 megabytes of ram running at 600+ mhz on a 128-bit bus. The Radeon 9600 Pro ran at 400 mhz for the core and 600 mhz for the memory, so at the very least, there is a 25% increase in the core speed. If you pray enough, the clock speeds will be in the high 500s and high 600s instead of low for the core and memory respectively.

The Radeon 9600 XT will start shipping in Octover with a MSRP of $199.

Below are a few benchmarks released by ATi. Remember, these are not ours.

Editor's Comments: While the clock speeds have not been finalized, ATI has left the floor open for its partners in terms of clock speed settings. Manufacturers will be able to choose themselves at what speeds to deliver the final 9600XT cards. The reason for this is because the RV360 cores supposedly have enough headroom for quite a range of speeds to be accomodated. ATI is also quite excited by the fact that the RV360 is the first low voltage GPU to be available in the market. The low power consumption of the chip is why they can do without the secondary power requirements, it's also going to mean that the core will produce less heat and can do with less robust cooling - we asked ATI whether it was possible for the low voltage RV360 to be passively cooled, and they're response was that it would not be impossible for someone to come up with some sort of passive cooling if the clock speeds were at the more modest end of the 9600XT's spectrum. Yummy news for silent PC enthusiasts indeed.