One of the competitors of this Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT. Both fine cards for the casual gamer in it's day. The ASUS does look like it has an advantage due to better memory cooling but since the backside of the card isn't cooling I doubt you'll get much benefit from it. The Sapphire is ever so slightly faster because it's memory is clocked 15MHz higher (DDR30). Nothing you'd be noticing during gaming but it makes the Sapphire stand out in the benchmarks. If it boils down to build quality I'd favor the ASUS card because most capacitors are solid state. > Read more

The Radeon 9600 XT is a faster version of the Radeon 9600 Pro. Basically the cards are the same but the XT-version is equipped with the RV360-GPU that generally clocks a bit better than the RV350 on the 9600 Pro. The RV360 is also equipped with an integrated temperature sensor.

The card was initially released in October 2003 as mid-range card to compete with the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra. My card is produced in April 2004 which puts it right before the release of the GeForce 6800-series. In April 2004 this 9600 XT would've been fine for the casual gamer. > Read more