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64 Shader Processors: NVIDIA Geforce 9600GT
NVIDIA's 65nm process has well proven it's worth in the upper-midend market. In bid of creating lower priced chipsets, G94's birth spells great news for bargain hunters. We pick through the flood of cards to deliver this review, featuring offerings fron Inno3D, Palit and XFX.
Unlike previous generations of graphics accelerators (think Radeon 9600XT, GeForce 4 MX) where creativity breeds competitive designs, today's graphics accelerators are all-too-often OEM offsprings. The dawn of a new chipset for NVIDIA will not attempt to stray from this safe trend; three of the four 9600GT graphics accelerators with us today are found with the P545 reference PCB design, complete with spoonfed component choices and layout.
| Model | Inno3D 9600GT 512MB | Inno3D 9600GT 512MB Overclock |
Palit/Xpertvision 9600GT 512MB |
XFX 9600GT 512MB XXX Edition |
Sapphire HD3850 512MB |
XFX 8800GS 384MB Alpha Dog XXX Edition |
Sparkle 8800GT 512MB Overclocked |
| Stream Processors | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 | 320 | 96 | 128 |
| Fab Process | 65nm | 65nm | 65nm | 65nm | 55nm | 65nm | 65nm |
| Core Clock (MHz) | 650 | 700 | 700 | 700 | 668 | 575 | 675 |
| Shader Clock (GHz) | 1.625 | 1.625 | 1.75 | 1.75 | - | 1.35 | 1.728 |
| Memory Clock (MHz) | 1800 DDR | 1900 DDR | 2000 DDR | 2000 DDR | 1656 DDR | 1700 DDR | 1800 DDR |
| Memory Type | GDDR3 | GDDR3 | GDDR3 | GDDR3 | GDDR3 | GDDR3 | GDDR3 |
| Memory Interface | 256bit | 256bit | 256bit | 256bit | 256bit | 192bit | 384bit |
| Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) | 57.6 | 57.6 | 57.6 | 57.6 | 52.99 | 40.8 | 86.4 |
| Texture Fillrate (billion/sec) | 20.8 | 20.8 | 20.8 | 20.8 | 10.688 | 27.6 | 36.8 |
| Power Connector | One | One | One | One | One | One | Two |
Specifications wise, the 9600GT cards with us today share much similarities. Clockspeeds and features would decide the desirablity of these graphics accelerators. We've prepared a 7-way shootout for these cards. How they do on paper is shown in the above table. Like the 8800GT, the 9600GT comes with a 2-phase VRM, we will touch further on that later in the review. More on setup configuration in the following CPU-Z dump:
CPU cooling was provided by a Swiftech Apogee GT looped in with a 2.120 heatercore and a LAING DC pump. Seagate 7200.7 80GB harddisks provided storage. Operating System was Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x86 with ForceWare 174.13 drivers.
