Digital Trends

Crucial Radeon 9600 Pro

December 21st, 2003 | by Doug Hall

Use and testing

This particular video card seemed to have all the promise of the newer technology and none of the hype associated with it, so we thought it might be a good idea to test out what we felt the GPU should be capable of from the press releases and specifications we have seen. Over clocking this particular card was easy and we used our standard favorite utility Rage3D video card tweaker which recognized the chipset and worked very well. Default settings for the Crucial RADEON 9600 Pro were preset and recognized at GPU core 441 MHz and memory was set at 331 MHz (662 MHZ effective DDR) at start up. The driver version being the latest Catalyst software 3.9 and 7-95-031028 drivers as well. 

Installation was typical and smooth. No difficulties were encountered at all, The Crucial RADEON 9600 Pro needs no external power to get to where it went which makes it truly plug and play. No AGP bus voltage increases or bus Overclocking was used.

As always, the drivers were the downloadable public versions from ATI's website and once again they produced an impressive score with no side effects.

Over clocking is an option and 490 core and 375.75 mem (751.5 effective) being the highest OC that we could produce on this card with the current drivers,. We feel confident that a better cooling solution would have produced higher results as it was very stable at that speed but very hot!. Few people would water or custom cool a low to mid range graphics card. For complete benchmarks results, please click on the performance tab above and th elink below this article.

Conclusion

The Crucial RADEON 9600 Pro is definitely the beginning of the shape of things to come from ATI chipsets in the near future. With die sizes shrinking and memory solutions becoming more available and affordable, it would definitely seem as though the potential is here for a compromise between the cost of a high-end graphics card and an affordable one. We would not be surprised if the RADEON 9600 followed the way of the 9500 in versatility and cost effectiveness. A very good bargain for the price to performance it is capable of.