Medion ATI Radeon 9600 XT Graphic Card Review

Good Points
Good price/performance ratio.

Bad Points
The cooling fan has a short life span.

General Comments
I have had this Medion Radeon 9600TX card for more than 2 years and I must say, I am very happy with the performance, even number crunchers like Doom 3 (with average quality) was no big deal for this card.



Unfortunately since a couple of days I started to see vertical bars after about 10-15 mins. This was even worse after this, I could not play any games as the rendering was gone for a six, even DivX movies were played with those infamous vertical shadowed bars. Later I found the reason for this. The cooling fan for the VGA processor was dying. By the time I opened the PC,the circular heatsink was hot that I got a blister after a half-a-second encounter. So my advice to anyone who sees the same symptoms: SWITCH off the PC asap and clean the heat sink of dust, in my case I was too late, there was enough dust to damage the cooling fan, now it only coughs, the chances are I will have to remove the old heat sink and fix a new one. I am looking at some coolers from arctic cooling.