Introduction

The Radeon 9600 XT is ATIs latest mid range offering, and is essentially a higher speed 9600 Pro. The XT tag will doubtless give a chuckle to anyone who has been into computers for more than a decade or so. XT was the standard that came before AT, so it is hardly associated with the cutting edge of technology. I don't have anything against acronyms, but the whole point of an acronym is that it is an abbreviation of a meaningful name. I blame Microsoft for starting this moronic bandwagon rolling when they released Windows XP.

Specs and Testbed Details

This particular 9600XT sports 128meg of video RAM, running at no less than 600 MHz. The graphics core runs at a blazing 500 MHz. This is no different to the 9600 pro, only another 100 MHz of GPU speed, and a bit of a core redesign to make this increase possible.

For benchmarking, I will be comparing with an ATI refererence 9700 Pro, and 8500. My test system is a hyperthreaded 3.2 ghz P4, running on an 800mhz FSB, with a Springdale chipset. It sports 1gb of Kingmax DDR400, in dual channel configuration. For the purposes of testing, I have clocked the CPU at 1.6 Ghz and 3.2 Ghz. The only difference between the two configurations is the multiplier. From this point on, the 3.2 Ghz system is referred to as "High End PC", and the 1.6 Ghz configuration as "Low End PC".

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