NVIDIA and ATI, the two major discrete GPU designers, segment retail costing such that their partners can hit defined price points. In turn, distributors and e-tailers make their margins, leading to the cards you see across the web and brick andmortar stores. Cards attract a premium when launched, reinforcing the supply versus demand model, but competition inevitably drives them lower. Over time, too, newer SKU's supplant present ones, pushing the cost to you, the consumer, even lower. Trawling the web today, around $150 will be enough to purchase a GeForce 9600 GT 512MB or even a Radeon HD 3870 512MB card. Spend just a little more and a GeForce 8800 GT can be yours. - Hexus

Inno3D GeForce 9600 GT 512MB OC Graphics Review

As a brief recap, the GeForce 9600 GT is a DirectX 10 toting GPU that's clocked in at 650/1800MHz for the engine and memory respectively, and that's a little higher than the slightly dearer GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, with which it shares a 256-bit memory bus. However, the GeForce 9600 GT card packs in 64 stream processors compared to the 112 shaders on the GeForce 8800 GT. The single slot taking card won't be quite as fast, but it does bring about an eclectic range of outputs, including HDMI and DisplayPort, should partners wish to implement them. It can be seen of as a better replacement for the GeForce 8600 GTS.

So yeah, Inno3D has raised the frequencies to 700/10900MHz for its OverClock model, which is one of six models in its GeForce 9600 range. The frequencies are hard wired into the BIOS, requiring no user intervention, unless you want to go even higher. We like the fact that $150 cards are shipping with 512MB of GDDR3 memory as standard, which is handy for higher resolutions and keeping the GPU from consistently streaming out to slower system memory through the PCI Express 2.0 interface. And SLI is supported, obviously, and two of these cards would cost about as much as a GeForce 9800 GTX overclocked model.

We've previously established that the GeForce 9600 GT is a better SKU than the one it replaced, the GeForce 8600 series. But the problem facing recommending the Inno3D GeForce 9600 GT 512MB OC edition is two-fold in nature. Priced at around $175 for the retail package, it's around $25 dearer than the company's own stock clocked Armour model and, just as crucially, $15 more expensive than a Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 512MB. Complicating matters further, the faster GeForce 8800 GT 512MB is also available from a starting point of around $190. So the choice to be made is rather huge with these various options.

Breaking that all down into sage buying advice, the Inno3D GeForce 9600 GT OC, whilst good, suffers from stunningly good competition. We'd recommend buying either a sub-$150 Radeon HD 3870 or a stock clocked GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, which is an intrinsically faster graphics card, albeit at the minor cost of fewer display outputs and a double height. Though it is a decent enough GeForce 9600 GT that's compromised by what else is out there, not least from Inno3D's own stable.