Traditionally, when NVIDIA launches a new family of GeForce cards, they start with the top end, grabbing first spot in all performance benchmarks. They have deviated from this plan with the GeForce 9 series, as we're introducing the GeForce 9600 GT, a mid-range video card from the new GeForce 9 family. A somehow questionable act many have thought, due to the current situation in the mainstream market we're offered a wide choice in high performance and/or price rated 3D adapters, but once you try to fit the pieces together everything suddenly seems to make perfect sense. Let's us first have a look at the top of the art technology NVIDIA added to this new family. - Madshrimps

Galaxy GeForce 9600 GT OverClock Graphics Review

The GeForce 9600 GT is the second generation DirectX 10 compatible video cards manufactured by NVIDIA. The card is equipped with a brand new G94 GPU and 512MB of memory of the third generation. Being DirectX 10 compatible, the G94 processor is designed around the unified shader architecture first seen in previous GeForce 8 family. This approach in the processor design allows the programmer to do many different kinds of 3D calculs on the same processor, with past generation video cards the GPU existed out of a few processing groups which were capable of doing only what they were designed to do.

While the new GeForce 9600 GT GPU is clocked the highest, it is not theoretical the fastest due to its only 64 stream processors. Others have either 96 or 112 processors enabled, that is a decent increment of shading processing power. We think that the GeForce 9600 GT is a good challenger for the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB or the newer GeForce 8800 GS 384MB, even though the G94 GPU has only 64 shaders enabled, due to its much higher clock rate it might catch up in pure rendering performance which leaves the memory and its bus width to decide who's the fastest of the three during actual gaming performance.

Galaxy is the first sample that hit our doorstep, being standard overclocked this card should perform in between the standard GeForce 9600 GT and the higher priced GeForce 8800 GT. As overclocking has become an important factor in the computer market, Galaxy wanted to make sure that their card was a strong one with lots of overclocking potential, the card is equipped with a dual slot cooling solution and a triple phase PWM module. The dual slot heatsink certainly drew my attention. Many GeForce 9600's will come with only a single slot cooling solution. Galaxy did not overvolt their GPU's to further increase clock speeds.

The special Xtreme Tuner application is very easy in use and allows BIOS flash in Windows. Galaxy has equipped their video card with dual BIOS chips making it highly worth its money whenever things go wrong. Overclocking related, compared to the reference NVIDIA clocks we found there is some space left but overall the overclock was far from impressive. Compared to many other articles it seems like we got stuck with one of the earlier samples which have small problems with transient voltage, this issue is fixed with second wave GeForce 9600 GT's and retail samples should yield much better generally.

Depending on where you live, prices may vary, but from the above comparison we think many will agree with us that the GeForce 9600 GT is a very good product with a high price to performance ratio. Second wave samples with higher clock speeds might bring the Georce 9600 GT to the GeForce 8800 GT performance level. You may want to look around, wondering where you can have the best deal, but as far as we can see you can't really go wrong with a nice GeForce 9600 GT graphics card.