NVIDIA'S GeForce 9500 GT - the replacement to the GeForce 8500 GT is basically an entry level solution that should be kept away from all but the most cash deprived gaming PCs. This card is meant for a multi¬media PC or an HTPC - these usage patterns suit its limited 3D performance better. Based around 32 SPs and a 128-bit memory interface the 9500 GT is a single slot card that does not require additional power over and above what the PCle bus can supply. These cards are 65 nm parts so heat isn't an issue. We were surprised to see all the 9500 GT-based cards were full profile ones. In our OpInIOn an HTPC should ide¬ally utilise a half profile card since most HTPC cabinets are really tiny.

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Features

We had a round figure of ten 9500 GT-based cards. Calibre had the most attractive look¬ing 9500 GT; their card has a neat looking heatpipe cool¬ing solution that is reasonably compact and utilises a small fan. The only downside is that the card is noticeably heavier than the stock cooling solu¬tion. In terms of cable and con¬nect bundling Palit and POV were the two main culprits - their bundling was rather skimpy. Sadly none of the ven¬dors thought it important to bundle any games with these cards. Since this cuts into their margins; it's understandable why such exclusions are made for what are perceived as value cards. The Calibre 9500 GT has a display panel bundled that gives important information on the clock speeds of the card.

Performance

Only Calibre, Gigabyte and ZOTAC fiddled with the GPU cores of their cards - while Calibre boost¬ed clocks from the default 550 MHz to 600 MHz, both Gigabyte and ZOTAC went with healthy overclocks of 100 MHz over stock speeds. One very important factor affecting these cards' perfor¬mance (as we discovered) is their memory subsystems. Since these are low end chipsets all vendors have fiddled around with mem¬ory options. Some have offered DDR2 memory which adversely affects bandwidth and therefore overall performance. Only three
vendors supplied fast GDDR3 memory with their cards - XFX, Calibre and ZOTAC and these cards were the fastest in this cat¬egory. In fact the difference that GDDR3 makes is startling - and makes a strong advertisement for advocating its use over DDR2 memory.