4.0 Visual Inspection

The card by Crucial shows itself very winning (figure 2): the printed circuit color is blue and that is not very common among Radeon producers; moreover the components topology follows the reference design.

The manufacturing process is very precise in every detail; also the components quality is high.

The molex connector to power supply is good quality and well fixed to the pcb. We tested that with a standard number of external devices it is just enough a 300 watt power supply to ensure normal system operations.

But the power turns into heat; in Figure 4 we can see the cooler system. That is not too noisy in its being opeating (it just needs one second transient where it is very noisy). The one single slot solution Crucial chose works well, so the back of the card doesn't need any more cooler system.

The cooler system is well fixed, mechanically safe, well-finished and long therm reliable (figure 5). That is really good as sometimes you can find card where the fixing is not too good and long therm that could even damage the vpu.

In figure 5, on the right, you can see the ATI RAGE THEATER's pins, this chip is versatile (video encoding and decoding, signal conversion to PAL or NTSC and viceversa) and you can use it for managing input signals to card, output signal to TV and for executing most of the video encoding standards.

The memory chips are made by Samsung and signed as K4J55323QF-GC20 (figure 6): they are latest DDR-III memories at 0,002 micron, they can work with lower power and voltage compared to the previous DDR-II. This can ensure both high performances and operating stability without needing any more cooler.

You can be surprised that Crucial, a Micron division, uses other brand memories and not its own ones, but the micro electronics market justifies it. In this way they can make an high quality product reducing costs.

The Figure 7 shows the Radeon X800 I/O interface and its four connectors for connecting the external devices.

From left to right you can see:

• VIVO connector;

• VGA connector;

• S-video connector;

• DVI-I connector.

The packaging is very accurate and compact.

[Figure 8 - High Resolution Image]

Inside you can find the cables and connectors shown in figure 9, the driver cdrom and a CyberLink's PowerDVD cdrom for DVDs playback. There aren't games inside, as usually happens with retail packaging. This could be not too much exciting but that is not a problem: often the games you find in packaging are demos or old.

[Figure 9 - High Resolution Image]

The Figure 9 shows from left to right the input signal cable, the composite cable, the cable for connection to high resolution screen or to HDTV, the supply cable and the DVI-I/VGA and S-video/composite connectors.

In the next page we introduce to testing sessions.

VPU Architecture

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Testing Sessions

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