Well as an ATI user ourselves, we can not dismiss the fact that one of the most versatile computer components that is out today, is these NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT based video card. Reason for us saying this, first it is cheap enough for just about anyone on any budget for light to moderate gaming, it can be used in a home theater PC for Blu-ray play back, and finally can be used as a dedicated PhysX card for those who wanting or needing that extra little bit in those PhysX based games. So as such this particular version does have multiple purposes that could fit with various needs depending on the usage. But in the end each could easily think of a solution where it would just fit perfectly. - Bjorn3D

ASUS Extreme N9600 GT 512MB Style Edition Review

As always ASUS does a wonderful job on presenting their products. Also ASUS gives us plenty of information on the GeForce 9600 GT accelerator. The GeForce 9600 GT is enclosed inside a white box, ASUS did a good job on making sure the video card would not get damaged during transportation. The one thing that catches our eyes, is that this GeForce 9600 GT is rather small. So just a quick glance on this video card we see this particular GeForce 9600 GT does not need the use of an external power supplementation. All this graphics card needs is the 75W from the motherboard to power it, which is delivered by the PCI Express.

The base of the heatsink that ASUS uses is fairly thick. Also notice the PCB of the board was not bowed or warped. The ASUS GeForce 9600 GT video card did not perform as well as we had expected it to. Though we realize that limiting the memory to 512MB would take a small performance hit, but not near as much as we were seeing. However not being able to SLI the ASUS GeForce 9600 GT with the Gigabyte version, did not make matters any better. We do know our MSI X58 Eclipse motherboard fully supports SLI and CrossFire configs so that was not the problem, rather the narrow minded support offered through the SLI technology.

So we also realize that NVIDIA wants to try and keep their multi GPU's to its highest possible performance level, but not having any flexibility is a no go in our books. We guess ATI's CrossFire flexibility had gotten us spoiled. Even though the performance was not up to as high as what we were expecting. We have to admit this, the GeForce 9600 GT graphics board is still one of the most flexible cards out there. By ASUS making these GeForce 9600 GT's smaller in size they add even more flexibility. And having a price point around the $95 mark puts this version in a higher end price scale, and there are better versions around for less.