Video Card: AIW 9600 Pro Review :: The Card

Hardware Features
Brand	ATI
Model	AIW 9600 Pro
Graphics Chip	Radeon 9600 Pro (RV350)
Graphics Memory Type	DDR
Memory (MB)	128
Graphics Core Clock (MHz)	400
Memory Clock (MHz)	325
Memory Speed (ns)	2.8
RAMDAC Frequency	400
Active cooling on Graphics Chip	Yes
Heatsink on Memory	No
Video Capture	Yes
System Health Monitoring	N/A
Ports
Dual Monitor Support	Yes
VGA Out Ports	VGA+VGA
Video In and Out Ports	S Video Out
Package and Support
Printed Manual	Yes
Driver CD	Yes
Performance Tool Software	No
Major Games	Half Life 2
Major Software	Pinnacle Studio 8-ATI version
VR Glasses	No
DVD Player Software	ATI DVD Player
Video Recording Software	MMC 8.7

The AIW RADEON 9600 Pro is outfitted with 128MB of DDR memory rated at 2.8ns. There are 8 chips, 4 on front 4 on back of the PCB. This gives a memory rating of 350 MHz theoretical. The memory clock on the AIW 9600 is 325 MHz, which is actually 25 MHz faster than the 9600 Pro that this card is based upon and the 9600XT which is ATI's replacement for the 9600 Pro. This gives a theoretical memory bandwidth of 10.4 GB/second. This compares to 9.6GB/second on the 9600 Pro/XT and 23.4 GB/second available on the 9800XT.

ATI outfitted the AIW 9600 Pro with a new Phillips analog tuner, replacing the previous tuner outfitted in all of their AIW cards since the AIW RADEON. Adding FM Radio abilities to the AIW series, this tuner has the same abilities as the previous one on earlier AIW cards. The card provides a 125-channel cable-ready TV tuner.

The AIW 9600 Pro also sports a Theater 200 chip. This chip is a single-chip analog video decoder and stereo audio processor. This chip is designed for video and audio capture applications including multimedia PC-to-TV video graphics cards, set-top boxes, personal video recorders, LCDs, TVs and other systems. Introduced on the AIW 9700 Pro released earlier late last year, this chip replaces the Rage Theater chip used in earlier cards.

The heat sink/fan combination is similar in many respects to many a video card released by ATI over the years. As the 9600 Pro VPU is pretty tiny, the heat sink/fan combination is smaller than that found on virtually every high-performance video card available. There are 9 fins on the fan assembly on the AIW 9600 Pro. It's actually interesting to note that the temperature on the AIW 9600 Pro is much lower than that of the 9800 Pro/XT while running. It's noticeable when putting a finger on the heat sink of the card. On the 9700/9800 it's scalding hot. On the AIW 9600 Pro it's not hot at all.

The input/output block is a little bit different from the normal i/o that ATI normally provides with their video cards including their other AIW cards. It sports a FM connector, a CATV connector, a block for the VGA cable and the S-Video port. The cable for the VGA block includes 2 VGA inputs which allows for dual monitor capability for the first time on an AIW card an excellent addition that I hope makes it into all further cards going forward, hopefully with dual-DVI connectors that can be modified with a DVI-VGA adapter to make dual-DVI setups with AIW cards a possibility.