HIS Excalibur Platinum Radeon 9600
The first thing that hit me when examining the Excalibur 9600 was its size and weight. It's a tiny card with no outrageous cooling, small PCB and no requirement for an external power supply. Compared to the Gainward with its slot eating cooler and mammoth bulk, this is dual-DVI on a definite diet.
An AGP8X device, the Excalibur 9600 will slot into any recent AGP system without a hitch. The rear of the card is very bare.
The card is populated by Elixir Memory's N2DS25616BT-5T DRAMs, 2.5V DDR400 TSOP devices.
The first DVI port is powered by the on-GPU TMDS (transition minimised differential signalling) transmitter, the second by a Silicon Bridge SB10172AB.
The heatsink is a pleasant silver design, equipped with a rather quiet fan. More on that later.
The Radeon 9600 that powers the Excalibur is a variant of the RV350 GPU, the part that ATI migrated to low-k and called the RV360, which now powers Radeon 9600XT. So while the plain 9600 is bottom of the 9600 pile, it's still equipped with the faculties needed to output a decent image with good mid-range speed.
Clocked at 325MHz core and 405MHz memory, the card gets pixel and texel fillrate numbers of 1300Mpixels/sec and 1300Mtexels/sec, by virtue of four pixel pipelines. Memory bandwidth sits at 6.48GB/sec due to the 128-bit bus, and the RV350's two vertex shaders combine to help it all do DX9.0 at decent speed.
The raw numbers are some way short of the boards the Excalibur will compete with in the benchmarks, but clock speed isn't everything. Just ask Intel.
Let's take a look at the bundle.
