XFX has made a solid place for themselves in the graphics card community and the dog has put many other companies in the dog house, especially when it comes to performance based video cards for the gamers who like top end products. The mid level market is usually the sweet spot for buyers and the new GeForce 9600 GT series is pretty much the leader in this race as its price versus performance ratio is excellent. This new overclocked version is set to be the highest end graphics card in the GeForce 9600 GT series of cards and will offer an exceptional bundle which includes the Call of Duty 4 game, which is one freaking hot gaming title and offering great SLI performance. - Motherboards

XFX GeForce 9600 GT XXX Alpha Dog Edition Review

The GeForce 9600 GT card is based upon NVIDIA's G94 chipset which is the replacement for the GeForce 8600 GT. It is based upon 65 nanometer process with 505 million transistors. And in many ways the GeForce 9600 GT is half a GeForce 8800 GT 512MB in terms of the number of texture units, the number of stream processors and in terms of raster operation units. But there are mitigating circumstances, which will allow the GeForce 9600 GT to outperform other cards with more shader processors in some instances. The memory bandwidth is an important consideration, and the GeForce 9600 GT from XFX has it in spades.

The memory clock on this card is 2.0GHz effective, meaning that with a 256-bit memory interface the bandwidth of the card is 64GB/second effective. That is a huge leap from the GeForce 8600 GT, which only had a 128-bit memory interface so the GeForce 9600 GT will benefit from the increase. There are 32 texturing units compared to the 64 found on the GeForce 8800 GT and other fully fledged NVIDIA high-end cards. Meaning the higher number counts a bit but texture fill rate isn't everything. The number of raster operation units on the GeForce 9600 GT is 16, which the same as those found on the higher-end cards as well.

As far as graphics card layout goes this card does not differ much from the pack other than a few graphical changes showing off the dog in good pose. Power requirements are very mild and you do not need a more than 600W power supply to handle a pair of these as each card only sports a single power connector. The card only occupies a single PCI Express slot so air flow and room in the case will not be over compromised and hindering airflow due to lack of interior space. In reality there is nothing that differentiates this card by way of its layout than most other graphics cards in this series, following the reference design.

Obviously, XFX has a winner on their hands for the mid-level buyer who wants either a single or multi-GPU SLI based system that is in the affordable range of most gamers who value performance and compatibility. In fact SLI means less stress on any single card in a given gaming environment and even if some games do not actually take full advantage of the features of SLI, the cards still are able to process and deliver more performance in situations where resolutions are high as are the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering capabilities in many of today's hottest game titles, but certainly also some new upcoming titles.

In our benchmarks a pair of these cards in SLI beats the GeForce 9800 GTX hands down and costs almost the same. That said a pair of these GeForce 9600 GT cards in an SLI configuration are able to bring to your viewing screen clean and clear visuals with all the bells and whistles turned up on all games, including Crysis, which in our humble opinion plainly is not a stable game in many instances and not worth its weight in plastic. All the other games played great and many of the titles have the pop up before the game menu so compatibility should be optimal in most circumstances, if not all for that matter.

XFX has a very solid warranty and support program, which adds a bit to the overall value equation and final buying choice. So what we have in the end game is a solid card, very well priced, performance savvy in SLI, and it comes with a free great game to boot. This is a most certainly an excellent product because at this price level it's a hard pair to beat.