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X-Micro are not a big name in Australia - I'd only heard of them a couple of months ago. However, they've been around since 1999 and list video cards as one of their major product lines. They also list Australia as one of their major markets on their company profile page and with Altech bringing their products into the country, we'll hopefully be seeing more from them in the future.

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This particular card boasts the GeForce4 Ti4600 chipset from nVIDIA. I cover this chipset and its new features in my review of Asus's Ti4600 product here, from a few weeks ago. X-Micro's card follows the reference design pretty closely - as it seems do all GF4 cards - but it's different to other cards I've seen in a couple of interesting ways:

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First is the use of heatsinks on the onboard video memory. These hint perhaps at an overclocking focus for the card and we'll see how it fares in that regard later. RAM is on both sides of this 128MB card and heatsinks cover all 8 chips.

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One potential issue with the RAMsinks is that they could foul tall components near the back of the AGP slot. As we saw in the Asus review, the array of components clustered along the back edge of Ti4600/Ti4400 cards can make installation problematic on certain motherboards. The RAMsinks on the X-Micro card can have a similar effect in a slightly different location, as seen by the card when used in Gigabyte's GA-7VTXE (VIA KT266A) motherboard. The Gigabyte board has a small locking clip to hold an AGP card in place, but it rises away from the slot and hits the RAMsinks, making insertion of the card impossible. Again I would probably lay the blame for this at the feet of the motherboard manufacturer, as suggested here by [H]ard|OCP. Fortunately, this plastic lug can be removed from the motherboard without damaging the board. I haven't seen any other motherboards with that style of clip or tall components that close to the socket, so hopefully it won't become a major issue.

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The second interesting thing concerns the TV-out cable provided with the card, which I'll cover in the next section..

Next Page - In the Box, Video-IN?

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