Thread: GeForce 9600 G1 I GSO Graphic Card

Ever since its launch the 9600 GT has been a winner. With just 64 stream processors (SPs) this GPU featured a 256-bit GDDR3 memory interface and could actually match the 112 SP bearing GeForce 8800 GT. This GPU is based around a 65 nm fabrication process which means any card based on this GPU will run quite cool and a single slot cooling solution will suffice. The 9600 GSO is a weird part. Its specifications cause us to wonder what exactly NVlDlA was thinking. On one hand they gave it 96 SPs - a bump up from the 9600 GT. On the other hand the memory bus width was butchered from 256-bits to 192-bits. This doesn't seem to make sense, as both these changes are counter-productive of each other. Since both these cores aren't too power hungry, they need a single six pin power connector.

Features

There were three 9600 GT cards and one 9600 GSO. Palit sent us both a 9600 GT and a 9600 GSO. Both cards had custom cooling solutions that really kept tem¬peratures below what the stock cooling can achieve. Although these cooling solutions do take up an additional slot; making these cards dual slot solutions. MSIs 9600 GT Zilent was unique - it had no fan, only a large heatsink with embedded heat¬pipes. Although HTPC users will appreciate the lack of a fan (read silence) the bulk of the cooling solution means you can't install this card inside a typically com¬pact HTPC cabinet. EVGA was the only vendor to send us a card with NVIDIA's reference cooler - although this solution is adequate for the 9600 GT.



There was a hike of around 10 degrees cen tigrade on the GPU core temperature when the card was stressed with benchmarks. All these vendors supplied the necessary cables to get you start¬ed and the de facto DVI to D-Sub connector. Palit was the only vendor who thought it worth while to bundle a game - their 9600 GT SONIC 1 GB came with Tomb Raider Anniversary Edition. This card also had HDMI and Display Port connectivity on the rear panel - a huge, pI us for anyone looking to hook this up to a large screen display. An optical out for audio was also provided - this is something new, that takes advantage of the inbuilt 7.1 audio decoding that all NVIDIA GeForce 8 and 9 series cards support.

Performance

All these cards feature GDDR3, although Palit's 9600 GT SONIC had 1 GB of video RAM, while the other two 9600 GTs had 512 MB each. The Palit 9600 GSO SONIC has 384 MB of 192-bit RAM. All the 9600 GTs had their cores clocked at a lively 700 MHz while the 9600 GSO had a core clock of 600 MHz. As expected the 9600 GTs performed very closely to each other with very little to choose between them. The 9600 GSO trails some way behind in most benchmarks except in Crysis and Company Of Heroes which are shader inten¬sive games. Here, presumably its lack of memory bandwidth is made up for by the extra SPs on the GPU, although it cannot overtake the trio of 9600 GTs. In terms of raw speed Palit's 9600 GT SONIC 1 GB was the fast¬est card amongst the foursome; EVGA trails by a hairsbreadth.