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ABIT RX600Pro Guru Review

ABIT is introducing some new video card technology known as vGuru. We are going to explore the ABIT RX600Pro and compare it in gaming against a GeForce 6600.

Introduction:

Some of you may be familiar with the uGuru technology that is built into some ABIT motherboards. If you aren’t, you can read all about it here. This technology has been available from ABIT for over a year now. It is important we first go over what uGuru allows for motherboards, because ABIT is extending this technology over to video cards. For motherboards, uGuru allows you to manipulate various motherboard settings from directly inside Windows with software. Not only does the software allow you to change settings, but you can also monitor the health of your motherboard. uGuru for the motherboard is composed of six applets: ABIT EQ, OCGuru, ABIT Audio EQ, FanEQ, FlashMenu, and ABIT BlackBox. Some of these functions and applets are the same for the ABIT Guru video cards.

Since uGuru depicts the technology used for motherboards, ABIT picked another name to describe the technology they are using for video cards. This technology is known as vGuru. To introduce this new technology ABIT is releasing the ABIT RX600Pro Guru and ABIT RX300SE Guru. vGuru is made up of OCGuru, FanEQ, and ABIT BlackBox. All of these applications are accessed via Windows and allow software control of the hardware of your video card.

The video card we are looking at today is the ABIT RX600Pro Guru. This video card is based on ATI’s Radeon X600Pro VPU. The Radeon X600Pro is a 4 pixel-pipeline native PCI Express VPU and runs at 400MHz frequency. It is a DX9 VPU supporting Pixel and Vertex Shader 2.0 support. Note that this does not have the same technology of the X700 or X800 series such as 3Dc and Pixel Shader 2.0b. The ABIT RX600Pro Guru uses 256MB of memory on a 128bit bus running at 257MHz (514MHz DDR).

The ABIT RX600Pro Guru:

The ABIT RX600Pro Guru has two different modes. In “Normal” mode the video card operates at 400MHz VPU frequency and the LED lights up green. By changing a jumper on the video card itself you can enable “XTurbo” mode which sets the VPU at 500MHz frequency and the LED turns red.

If you have all the vGuru software installed, OCGuru will tell you which mode you are in when you boot your computer up.

ABIT is using an orange colored PCB with four memory modules on the front side and four on the back. The RAM modules on the front side are passively cooled with heatsinks, however they don’t fully cover the modules. There is no cooling for the ones on the back. The heatsink for the VPU is very light and made of aluminum. There is no external power needed; the video card draws all of its power from the PCI Express slot.

The RAM being used is Samsung DDR1 66 pin TSOP packaged modules rated at 250MHz. There is DVI, VGA, and TV-Out support, with no VIVO capabilities on this model. The fan lights up blue while in operation. In the retail package a user's manual and vGuru manual will be included along with an installation CD and PowerDVD 5. There will also be an S-Video cable, Composite cable, DVI to VGA adapter, and S-Video to Composite adapter.

This is what OCGuru looks like. In the first picture above the card is set to normal mode, and as you can see the exact frequencies are 405MHz VPU and 257MHz memory. In the second picture the card is in XTurbo mode and the VPU is now set at 500MHz and the memory is still at 257MHz.

With OCGuru you can actually change the core and memory voltages on the video card.

With FanEQ you can adjust the temperatures at which the fan speeds up or slows down. The automatic default settings of the video card are shown above. At the highest RPM of the FAN we did not notice noise being a problem.

You can setup OCGuru so that it sends you an email if there are any warnings due to temperature or other problems. You can also change when the temperature warning will kick in.