Final thoughts
£125 or so buys you an awful lot of graphics card power. That's the kind of price range that houses cards that directly benefit from the flagship model's technical prowess. The PowerColor Radeon 9600XT Bravo 128MB is a case in point. Think of it as a pared down 9800XT and you won't be too far wrong. PowerColor knew it was on to a good thing with the RV360 GPU. It's cool, it scales well, and, importantly, it performs well in a myriad of benchmarks. We're fans of partners who try to distinguish their products from the homogeneous crowd. PowerColor adds in VIVO support via the tried and trusted Rage Theater ASIC. It also needs to be commended for raising the memory frequency of its 9600XT to an effective speed of 675MHz. The end results is predictable. The Bravo more than holds its own in the company of NVIDIA's FX 5700 Ultra cards, and it does especially well in DX9 benchmarks.It's difficult to manufacture an intrinsically bad Radeon 9600XT. PowerColor has done just fine with its attempt. It's small, it's quiet, it overclocks like a champ, and it doesn't cost the earth. Just don't expect super-smooth gameplay with every conceivable option turned to the maximum, especially with DX9 games. If you fully understand the architectural limitations that ATI had to make to the RV360 design for it to be a profitable GPU, you'll appreciate that its forte is at medium resolutions with a reasonable level of image enhancement through edge and texture aliasing. As you might have guessed, we like the Radeon 9600XT. We also like the PowerColor 9600XT Bravo card, naturally. It's not perfect, no card is, but it deserves to be shortlisted in the sub-£150 class. NVIDIA's assault on this sector of the market is far from finished. The FX 5900XT looks every inch a winner. Whatever the state of play, we rekon the PowerColor 9600XT Bravo 128MB card is a safe bet. Recommended.
