Asus has traditionally had eye-catching boxes for their video cards as well.
The RADEON 9600XT box art has a striking picture of a beautiful woman with
ornate jewelry around her neck and head. On the front cover of the box is
a picture of Half Life 2 as a free game, a award from Tom’s Hardware,
and a listing of the Asus specific features including Digital VCR, Video Security,
Smart Cooling, Smart Doctor and Game Face. The back of the box contains a
picture of the 9600XT along with arrows pointing to the various features and
a description of the primary features supported by the 9600XT.
ASUS really knows how to put together a card. With BFG’s
card straining to fit easily into my case, the 9600XT on the other hand is less
than 6” long. One extremely nice thing about this card is that no external
power connector is required to operate. Many if not most of today’s mainstream
and high-end video cards require an external power supply connector like the
9800XT and NVIDIA 5950/5700 Ultra. The back side of the card has 4 memory chips,
several capacitors and a Rage Theater chip for VIVO.
ASUS has outfitted their version of the 9600XT with 8 128 megabit
memory chips, like the 5700 Ultra, 4 on the front side of the PCB 4 on the back
side of the PCB. There is a memory heat sink covering the front 4 memory chips.
It’s a nice addition to the card, and I wish more video cards would have
memory heat sinks. Unfortunately, ATI only specced the 9600XT for 300 MHz memory,
which makes the heat sinks less of a necessity.
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