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HIS Excalibur 9600 Dual DVI HIS Excalibur 9600 Dual DVI: Armed with a Dual DVI interface, we check this feature out, as well as the image quality and gaming performance.
Date: April 6, 2004
Manufacturer:
Written By:
Price:

HIS has been a graphics card manufacturer for almost as long as I have been alive. Although not being known as much in America as other places in the world HIS has been catching more people's eyes lately with some very interesting and well performing products.

HIS has been releasing some new features with their current video cards which seem to be working quite well, one such example is their new IceQ cooling system as well as their iCooler system which seemed to please Hubert in his recent review.

One very new feature which is sure to turn many heads in the ATI crowd is the availability of a Dual DVI based card. The ability to hook up two high end monitors is sure to please a very lucky group of individuals and has been a long overdue feature. Backed up with the ATI 9600 GPU and 256MB DDR ram, the should be quite the card.

HIS Excalibur 9600 Dual DVI
VPU: ATI Radeon 9600
VPU Speed: 325Mhz
Memory: 256MB
Memory Speed: 400Mhz
Memory Interface: 128-bit
Bus: AGP8X/4X
3D Support: DirectX 9 & OpenGL
Connections: DVI-I, DVI-I, S-Video Out
Bundle: 3D Album, PowerDVD 5, 6in1 Game Collection, Zanzarah

HIS Excalibur 9600 Dual DVI

The 9600 Dual DVI came in the regular rectangular box with an almost blade based logo in the center. Around the logo are the model name and the main features of the card. It appears as if HIS just uses their standard 9600 box and adds the Dual DVI sticker. The back of the box has a multi-lingual chart with the specifications for the Radeon 9600. Interesting to note is the chart says the card has one 15-pin VGA connector as well as one DVI-I connector, even though the card does have Dual-DVI. Inside the box we see the video card wrapped in an anti-static bag. Along side the video card is one DVI-VGA adapter and an S-Video cable. For those of you who do not have a DVI monitor and want to run dual-displays you will have to purchase a second adapter separate in order to use the second monitor.

Along with the video card a small bundle. A short multi-lingual manual is included along with PowerDVD 5, 3D-Album, Zanzarah, and a 6-in-1 game collection. One thing I had hoped to see, but did not was a Half-Life 2 voucher. ATI has been including these in a lot of there cards now, but it appears HIS decided to leave that out of this model.

The HIS 9600 Dual DVI is based off a red PCB. HIS did not include any special cooling technologies for the 9600, using a more traditional VPU heat sink and fan. The Excalibur 9600's VPU is set at 325 MHz, so advanced cooling should not be that necessary. No cooling on the RAM is provided, which although not necessary, it is still a nice feature to see. 256MB of 400MHz memory on the 128-bit interface is used. Also shown is a size comparison between the Excalibur 9600 and the Albatron FX5600.

On the business end of the card, we see the Dual DVI connectors. TV-Out capabilities are handled by a single S-Video connector. HIS only included one DVI-VGA adapter, so dual monitor users may have to purchase a second adapter.

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