GigaCube Radeon 9600 Pro Game Buster

Company: GigaCube
Product: Radeon 9600 Pro Game Buster
Street Price: ~$145
Date Reviewed: July 30, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

Taking A Look At The Card:

As with most ATi cards, the 9600 Pro Game Buster is constructed on a red PCB. Underneath the heatsink is the R350 graphics processing core. The stock speed of the core is 400 MHz. As we said earlier it does support DirectX 9 , which means that it will technically be able to play the next generation games that are based on DirectX 9 technology. Just because the game will play does not  mean that they will run smooth. The card is equipped with four rendering pipelines, which is what makes it lower performer than say the 9700 Pro, which has eight rendering pipelines. Another reason this card is considerably slower than the 9700 Pro is because it has a 128-bit memory interface whereas the 9700 Pro has a 256-bit interface.

The heatsink is made out of aluminum. There is a sticker in the center of the fan bearing the Powered By ATi logo. The heatsink and fan are decent but hardcore overclockers and enthusiasts might want to change it out to something that cools a better. Where the fan meets the heatsink, there is a blue, a green, and a red LED. When the card is powered on, the LEDs light up, but they also flash, making it look like a disco club. It is hard to explain and something that users have to experience for themselves. Overall, the effect does look good and would nicely accommodate a window modified case.

GigaCube has chosen to go with the Samsung K4D263238E-GC33 memory chips. This memory is rated at 3.3ns, which means that it has a max frequency of 300MHz. We have seen faster memory used on the 9600 Pro cards, such as the 2.86ns memory found on the Sapphire line. As was mentioned before, the memory is on a 128-bit DDR interface. The modules on the Game Buster should be decent for overclocking, but we will find out more in the overclocking section.

You can see in the picture above that the card does come with a standard DB-15 connector, which is used for analog monitors. The card also has a TV-out so that users can view images and video on their TV. The card does not have a TV-in, but it would have made a nice addition. That last connector that the card provides is a DVI (Digital Visual Interface). This is the connector that is mainly used for LCD monitors.