Recently NVIDIA launched their first card in the GeForce 9 series. It is based on the new G94 core which uses the same architecture as the G92, it actually is a G92 with less shaders inside the die. The actual number of shaders is 64, versus 128 on the G92 chipset. This helps bring down the transistor count and die size, resulting in a manufacturing cost reduction. The EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT SSC board comes at greatly increased clocks over the NVIDIA reference design. Even though the cooler is the same, EVGA has beefed it up with some graphics and also adjusted the fan controller speeds it seems. But if that will make a huge difference is hard to tell at this point, but we will see shortly. - techPowerUp!

EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT SSC 512MB Edition Review

The package looks like the typical EVGA package with a small window on the back. Also the back of the box features a sheet that goes into more details on the specifications in multiple languages. Just like the NVIDIA reference design, EVGA uses a single slot cooling solution. To add more branding to the cooler, which is the same as the NVIDIA reference cooler, EVGA has added some print on the fan hub and the cooler. A small sticker is sitting on top of the spot where you usually see a GeForce writing. The sticker is not placed very accurately and also there is more than one. This gives a less professional look than intended

As mentioned before, the cooler is the NVIDIA reference cooler with an EVGA graphics on top. This card is compatible with SLI and can be paired with any other GeForce 9600 GT card. The power connector on the back is required to supply power to the card. It is also required when running in PCI Express 2.0 mode, which would be able to supply all power over the bus. The Samsung memory chips are rated at 1.0ns which means a nominal speed of 2000MHz. In our overclocking tests we saw the card break even 2200MHz. The NVIDIA new G94 GPU, which is made on a 65nm process with 505 million transistors.

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of RivaTuner, ATITool and our popular benchmarking suites. The final overclocks of our card are 805MHz core and 2164MHz memory speed. EVGA's sample is an excellent overclocker being the first GeForce 9600 GT card on our testbench that could beat the 800MHz core frequency mark with stock cooling. Also the memory overclock is really big considering the memory chips are marked for 2.0GHz operating frequency. Next to that the EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT SSC edition is sold for about $179, which is $10 more than the reference clocks cards.

And in a nutshell EVGA's e-GeForce 9600 GT SSC edition offers quite a bit more performance for an extra price increase over the reference design GeForce 9600 GT graphics accelerator. This ensures that the cards shares the number one performance versus price spot with the reference card. Since the performance is higher, but the power consumption is only slightly increased, EVGA's card can also claim the number one performance per watt efficiency spot. Overall this shows that EVGA knows exactly what their product can deliver and how the competition is positioned, and we know that EVGA is generally leading the pack.

Combined with the EVGA limited lifetime warranty this should be a card that you can easily use for a year or two. Although a minor negative thing we noticed was that the fan speed ramps up quickly when the card is under load for a longer period of time. Though due to the increase fans peed you get a card that is running cooler and able to deliver greater gaming performance.