Lately it feels like everywhere you look is overrun by affordable video cards in the newly trendy $100-200 price point. Now AMD has released the Radeon HD 4850, introduced the excellent entry level Radeon HD 4770, and lowered the prices on the Radeon HD 4870. NVIDIA has responded by pushing down the price of the GeForce GTX 260, renaming their GeForce 9800 GTX+ as the GeForce GTS 250, and have now brought back an old friend, the GeForce 9600 GT version. So now, while you might be familiar with GeForce 9600 GT from last year, NVIDIA has a bit of a surprise in store. The first is a die shrink, moving the G94 to 55nm and a second is a brand new stepping, aimed at cutting power consumption. - PCStats

ASUS Extreme N9600 GT (55nm) 512MB Style Review

As such it reduces the core voltage from 1.10V down to 1.00V, and does away with auxiliary power connector altogether. Everything else stays pretty close to the original GeForce 9600 GT video card you know and love. The ASUS Extreme N9600 GT board has a core clock speed of 600MHz, a 1500MHz shader clock and 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1800MHz effective. The ASUS version should retail for around $100 which makes this graphics card a direct competitor with AMD's Radeon HD 4770. The Radeon HD 4770 has been widely praised for its lower power consumption, in no small part due to its die shrink to 40nm.

The ASUS Extreme N9600 GT is unique among the 55nm based GeForce 9600 GT cards because it doesn't require an additional power connector. The GeForce 9600 GT core is clocked by default at 600MHz. Starting with the GPU first, the speed was quickly overclocked to 656MHz. And finally we went for the gusto with an 726MHz core clock. Now after that we then turned our attention to the 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked by default at 1800MHz. The board was overclocked aggressively with nTune to a speed of 1888MHz, which remained stable through our overclocking tests. This is a quite nice result but not top compared to others.

When comparing this GeForce 9600 GT to the AMD Radeon HD 4770, the most applicable term would be less power. The good news is that the Extreme N9600 GT card does indeed draw less power than the Radeon HD 4770. In fact, it draws so little power that you don't need an auxiliary 6-pin power connector to run it. The move to a 55nm production process, and a new stepping that has reduced voltage requirements helps make this graphics card compatible with a lot of older PC's. At $100, the Extreme N9600 GT is an odd duck. If you want performance and gaming, get the Radeon HD 4770, it's about the same price and faster.

While their G94 chipset and the GeForce 9600 GT have given us some good times, they've simply grown too old to keep up with today's new entry level video cards. It's time to let these once proud veterans of the graphics card wars retire to greener pastures. Or at least give them a price cut.