ATI Radeon 64MB DDR

The Card

The Radeon 64MB DDR and Radeon 32MB DDR, which will be available in retail locations by the time you are reading this, are the first installments of the Rage6C core. Look for a 32MB SDR version in the near future, however these cards are not shipping yet. We tested a 64MB DDR retail card.

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The first thing that is noteworthy about the design of the Radeon 64MB card is the abundance of TV in and out features. Powered by the same Rage Theater chip that provided the video functions of Rage128 Pro cards, this chip is one powerful component on the card. Featuring both composite in, composite out and S-Video out, we have always been happy with the high quality captures and outputs that the Rage Theater chip provided. More information on the features of this chip as well as some of the advanced video features that the Radeon core actually possesses can be found in the following section.

Based on a .18 micron architecture, the core of the Radeon runs relatively cool. In fact, the card dissipates about 8W max power, about 4W more than that of the extremely cool GeForce 2 MX and 8W less than the hot running GeForce 256 chip. As a result of this cool running temperature, the heatsink and fan combination on the Radeon is rather small. We suspect that ATI did not need to even add the fan and/or heatsink but did so to improve the visual characteristics of the card: when one sees a card with out any form of active cooling, one usually assumes that it is a lower performing card.

With all the video input and output features of the card, there was no room to place a DVI connector on the board to take advantage of the core's built-in TMDS. We suspect that all DVI cards will be sold through OEM channels and will lack any of the VIVO features seen on this test card here. It will most likely be possible to pick up one of these cards in white-box OEM only version, but don't look for it on the retail shelves.

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Our 64MB card came outfitted with eight 5.5 Ns Hyundai DDR SDRAM parts in 8MB densities mounted on both the front and the back of the PCB. The first batch of cards should come with the same memory type, however ATI left the possibilities open that other RAM manufacturers may be contributing to the Radeon card. We have always had good experiences overclocking Hyundai RAM, and a fact which we will investigate how it performs in the Radeon in the overclocking section.

No other feature of the Radeon 64MB PCB board was noteworthy. Similar to many cards we have seen in recent months, the Radeon reference design has a plethora of capacitors and inductors to aid in power regulation.