GeXcube Radeon 9600XT Extreme
Design of GeXcube Radeon 9600XT Extreme
The wiring of the board has nothing to do with the formerly reviewed ASUS Radeon 9600XT - that's the first thing to note. The board has been seriously re-worked, with its circuit technology upgraded and the voltage regulation circuit enhanced.
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The board offers 128 Mb of DDR memory, 2x/4x/8x AGP, and a standard set of output connectors: one analogous, one digital, and one TV-OUT. No VIVO chip is installed.
Memory:
The video card is equipped with 128 MB DDR memory packaged in 8 chips (4 chips on each of the sides - front and rear sides of the PCB) of 128-bit memory bus.
The memory is produced by Samsung (K4D263238E-GC25), offers a 2.5 ns access time, which is equivalent to approximately 400 MHz of memory operation (800 MHz), but the memory is set to 350 MHz (700 MHz). Therefore, there is a small margin for memory overclocking, which we'll definitely verify. Remember that Radeon 9600XT reference cards offer 2.8 ns access time memory running at 300 MHz (600 MHz).
But the graphic chip is intact and, as per the specifications, runs at its intended 500 MHz.
Cooling system:
The cooling system is a block whose dimensions are reduced to fit the dimensions of the higher-end Radeon 9800XT:
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The construction material is aluminum, but the fastening leaves much to be desired. As you can see on the screenshot, the whole system is fastened with two plastic pins.
 
The very strange 1-mm thick spacers between the memory chips and radiator led us into a dead end! The construction material is sort of a rubber plastic whose thermal conductivity raises great doubts. What on earth is this fashion these days? In chase of manufacturability of the assembly process for video cards on the production line, it's much easier to botch rubber items than devoting more time thoroughly applying thermal paste. Nevertheless, this thermal interface did a good job in overclocking the memory, which even was surprising. You can of course tear off those rubbers ... if you apply a bit more efforts, but this results in a huge gap between the cooling plate and the memory chips, i.e. you would have to glue metal spacers on the spots of thermal contact with KPT paste. All in all, this a job for confirmed overclockers and does not take a few seconds. In exchange you will get speedy memory and a loss of guarantee servicing.
Another difference from 9600XT reference cards is additional cooling of memory on the reverse side.
Now it's time we estimated the performance versus the standard Radeon 9600XT and the rival FX5700Ultra (pages 4,5), and then determine its place in the whole line of modern video cards (p.6).
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MoBo:
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VGA Card:
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CPU & Memory:
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