GeXcube Radeon 9600XT Extreme

Info-Tek Corp. Taiwan, and its GeXcube brand of graphic products are still little known in Russia, and it makes sense telling a bit more about them. The company was established in 1990 as a developer and supplier of solely video cards. To date, these are only cards built on ATI chips, and the company is not going to change such strategy.

22% of the company property is owned by IT specialists of GIGABYTE, with the major package of shares owned by a Taiwanese millionaire investor. The management, marketing, engineering and quality assurance services are based in a united building within the numerous techno-parks of Taipei, by the way, in the same building where AOpen are based. The manufacture of products is performed at one of the four factories of Info-Tek in China.

Anyway, something's going wrong with the company name - the website address is www.gecube.com.tw, the brand on the boxes says GeXcube, and the nameplate on the wall says it's premises by "GIGAXCUBE" that belongs to Info-Tek Corp and partly is a division of GIGABYTE. In short, the Chinese chaos :-)

You can get an idea of the full line of GeXcube video cards on the company's product page. That's already an official line currently being manufactured. Our "guinea-pig" is still not there.

Inside the laboratory, there was developed a secret project dubbed GeXcube Radeon 9600XT Extreme - an advanced version of 9600XT with increased memory operating frequencies. The thing is that ATI Radeon 9600XT in its reference design cannot compete on par with NVIDIA GeForce FX5700 Ultra, which we saw in the review GeForce FX5700 Ultra. The work of NVIDIA for the middle-end sector of the market proved to be much more powerful. So the only possible competition remains in the pricing pressure. GIGAXCUBE, a faithful follower of ATI, did not undergo such state of affairs and decided to rescue ATI's reputation on their own :-)

So, we'll find it out how they succeeded in managing the posed task.

*1200x845; 163Kb

Package bundle:

• The graphics board itself;
• Splitter adapter;
• DVI-to-D-Sub adapter;
• A thick manual in 8 languages;
  Soft:
• Driver (modification of Catalyst 3.9)
• Black Hawk Down - full version;
• Power DVD XP 4.0 - full version;

Hardly ever hardware manufacturers specify the version number for the driver written on the CD. And it's really unprecedented if the version turns out to be of the latest available. The probability of that outcome is negligible. The discs are ordered as a batch for several lines at at time and get awfully outdates by the time they are distributed among the boxes. In our case, all the further tests of the board and its rivals were done on Catalyst 3.10, but that the driver version is shown saves the user's time exploring the CD contents. But we rummaged about it and found three ATI's demos for Radeon 9800 cards taking up 80 Mb, which is nice.

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