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- Date:
- Monday , September 20, 2004
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Sean Quinn
- Google +1
Radeon X600XT PCI-E Roundup
What does mainstream PCI-Express have to offer? We round up three X600XT VPU based video cards from ABIT, MSI, and Sapphire and face off against a MSI GeForce PCX 5750.
ABIT Radeon X600XT PCI-E 128MB:
Earlier this year ABIT decided it wanted to pick up and start selling ATI-based video cards. We took at look last March at their 9800XT, which provided very solid gaming performance. However we were a little distraught at its overclocking abilities. We bring this up because we saw a trend in the card we are reviewing today that we witnessed in that video card, which you will see in the overclocking section.
ABIT’s current ATI product lineup includes all cards from the X800XT-PE PCI-E down to the Radeon 9200. The card that we are looking at specifically today is the ABIT RX600XT PCI-E.
To sum up its features, it supports Shader Model 2.0 in a Native PCI-Express format with SMOOTHVISION 2.1 allowing 2x/4x/6x multi-sample AntiAliasing and 2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering. It has 4 pixel pipelines and 2 vertex engines, which are the same specs as a 9600XT. The ABIT RX600XT PCI-E is supposed to be clocked at 500MHz core. We say supposed to because ABIT's website specifically states a VPU core speed of 500MHz, but ours was clocked slightly higher by default, at 513MHz.
Here are the exact clock speeds our card was set at upon installation: 513MHz VPU and 371MHz memory (742MHz DDR).
Above you can see the layout of the ABIT RX600XT PCI-E. The PCB is orange, much like their latest motherboards. This is the fanciest video card we have on the test bench today. The heatsink fan unit is rounded with a light blue plate covering it and the RAM sinks extend from the main heatsink unit into a rounded off design. Unfortunately, there are no heatsinks on the RAM modules on the back, only the front ones get cooled.
Considering this is ABIT we are talking about here, it surprised us how poorly implemented the RAM cooling technology was applied. If you look at the pictures above you can see the thermal pads that ABIT is using to make contact with the RAM modules and the heatsinks. Unfortunately, as you can see in the first picture, the pad is only covering half of the RAM module. The second one in the second picture is slightly better, but still not covering the whole RAM module. Now it is very hard to say if this has a bad impact, but certainly this is not workmanship up to the ABIT standard that we are used to, even at the $200 price point.
The video card does light up though!
The RAM modules used on this card are the same as the ones on the ATI Reference X600XT, Hynix 2.5ns 400MHz modules. This card has DVI, VGA, and TV-Out with no VIVO.
The ABIT RX600XT PCI-E comes with Composite and S-Video TV-Out cables, DVI to VGA converter, manuals, and a CD.
On the CD comes Catalyst version 2.2, so you will definitely want to download the latest version from ATI. You can also access the online manual from the CD, which you will need Acrobat Reader installed to view. The CD also contains an ATI flash utility to save the image from the flash ROM or to flash a new version on it. DirectX 9.0b is included as well as a full version of PowerDVD 5.0.