Date:
Sunday , March 23, 2008
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT Roundup

The NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT arrived to thunderous praise for its performance below $200. We've got three differently clocked video cards based on the new GPU from ASUS, EVGA and KFA2 up for evaluation, and we'll see what they can do in Crysis, COD 4 and UT3.

Introduction

Launched on February 21, 2008, the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT GPU marked an attempt by NVIDIA to recapture the attention of the sub-$200 video card market. Previously, NVIDIA had only the underpowered GeForce 8600 series to compete with the more powerful ATI Radeon HD 3850. All of that changed, however, when NVIDIA released the GeForce 9600 GT GPU, which we found to be able to outperform the very capable ATI Radeon HD 3870, if only by a small margin.

Our only complaint was pricing. Initially, the MSRP for video cards based on the GeForce 9600 GT GPU was $169 to $189 USD. However, most such video cards were found between $179 and $209 on launch day. It has been almsost a month since that day, and prices have come down. Today, prices range from $149.99 to $229.99, with most of these video cards coming in under $185. At the same time, video cards with the more powerful (but hotter running) GeForce 8800 GT can be purchased starting at $179.99, going up to $289.99. So there is some overlap in the market value of the GeForce 8800 GT and the GeForce 9600 GT.

The GeForce 9600 GT has its work cut out for it. Not only does it have to establish itself as a good product in its own right, but it has to compete with its older and more capable siblings with falling prices.

The NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT GPU

The GeForce 9600 GT is made up of 505 million transistors manufactured at 65 nm and contains 64 stream processors, compared to the 8800 GT’s 112, and the 8800 GTS 512MB’s 128. There are 16 ROPs inside and the GPU can do 32 bilinear filtered texels per clock. The core clock is set at 650MHz with a shader clock of 1.625GHz. You will find 512MB of GDDR3 memory standard on the 9600 GT clocked at 1.8GHz on a 256-bit bus. Only one 6-pin power connector is required and this video card is specified at a maximum of 95 watts at full load. The GeForce 9600 GT reference design is a single-slot video card, though you will see some unique models from add-in-board partners with double-slot cooling solutions.

The Video Cards

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For this roundup, we are examining 3 video cards based on the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT GPU. First up is the ASUS EN9600 GT, available from Newegg for a mere $169.99 USD.

Next up is the EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT SSC, featuring a strong factory overclock and a lifetime warranty. It can be purchased today from Newegg for $189.99 USD.

Last, but certainly not least, we have the KFA2 GeForce 9600 GT OC. KFA2 is a new brand for us, and it is a division of the Hong-Kong based Galaxy Technology. Being a new brand, availability isn't great for KFA2 products. Tigerdirect lists the KFA2 GeForce 9600 GT OC, but it is marked as "No Longer Available" and no price is given. However, they do list a number of other KFA2 products, so it does appear that KFA2 is actually available in the US, even if this product isn't on the shelves just yet.

All of these video cards feature 512 MB of GDDR3. But of these 3 products, only the KFA2 video card appears to stray from NVIDIA's reference design. It uses a different cooler, but it also sports a slightly shorter PCB than the ASUS and EVGA video cards. The cooler is considerably larger, featuring many thin, folded aluminum fins bonded to a heavy aluminum baseplate. It is a two-slot cooling solution, though the PCI bracket does not require two ATX expansion slots. But we'll have more on that on page 4.

The Games

For this evaluation, we will be using 3 games. First is Crysis, with its recently minted patch version 1.2. Note: There is a patch hotfix (version 1.2.1) available now, but it is a fix for a multiplayer stability issue, and not a performance related update. Crysis is the 800 pound gorilla of first-person-shooters this season, featuring incredible graphical fidelity and equally incredible system requirements.

Then we will look at how these 3 video cards perform in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, using patch version 1.5. Call of Duty 4 is a cinematic game, emphasizing stories and settings intermixed with brief periods of cinematic sequences to help cement those stories. It is one of the most photorealistic shooters to date, and it has been well optimized and runs very well in a wide gamut of hardware configurations.

Finally, we have Unreal Tournament III, patched to version 1.2. Unreal Tournament 3 brings to bare the same fast-paced action that has made the Unreal Tournament series great, but with significant graphical upgrades. However, in spite of its impressive visuals, Unreal Tournament III is very well optimized and runs well on just about any $150+ video card made in the last 15 months.