News Lunchtime 9600XT Roundup

Well, there's a fair few 9600XT reviews to look at today, from various sites, and with varying degrees of controversy:

Beyond3D gets into the nitty-gritty:

"With the change from RV350 to RV360 an enhanced version of the 130nm LV process became available with a new "Black Diamond" insulating material with a lower capacitance than FSG and hence a lower diametric constant (k). This gives rise to the term low-k 130nm process and this facilitates even faster transistors switching, thus greater speeds. When RV350 was initially taped out in January '03 it had a target clock speed of 350MHZ, however as the 130nm process matured, by the time it reached final silicon in May the yield enabled ATI to ship it at 400MHz. With the low-k process RV360 is able to move up by an extra 100MHz to 500MHz, and with OVERDRIVE enabled further speed will be available to all users of the Radeon 9600 XT."

Lots more techy-ness here

Spode's Abode bemoans the naming of the new ATi Series:

"The Radeon 9600 XT is ATIs latest mid range offering, and is essentially a higher speed 9600 Pro. The XT tag will doubtless give a chuckle to anyone who has been into computers for more than a decade or so. XT was the standard that came before AT, so it is hardly associated with the cutting edge of technology. I don't have anything against acronyms, but the whole point of an acronym is that it is an abbreviation of a meaningful name. I blame Microsoft for starting this moronic bandwagon rolling when they released Windows XP."

More from Spode here

Hardware Analysis get all Shakesperian on us:

Radeon 9600 XT, much ado about nothing? ATi's Radeon 9600 XT has just started shipping and we take a look at how it compares to the original Radeon 9600 Pro, the 9800 Pro and the flagship 9800 XT. Is it the world's fastest budget videocard?

"Midsummer's Night Dream", or "Winter of Discontent"? Find out here

And finally, Hexus shows us how to ignore an NDA:

TMSC's process enhancements have basically handed ATI a fall refresh on a plate, and combined with the new drivers, it almost feels like a totally different product to 9600 Pro.

Lots of core overclocking headroom (please please put better memory modules on retail boards if ATI's partners are listening), a decent price and very competitive performance. You can't ask for more than that.

Head to Head with the 'secret' NV36 here