NVIDIA has launched its first GeForce 9 series graphics card in the form of GeForce 9600GT. A bit unusual of NVIDIA to start of a new series with a mid-range card, but GeForce 9600GT is intended to compete with AMD’s best-sellers Radeon HD 3870/3850, costing around $180-210. A trend we could see already with AMD’s launches last year is that this segment offers a tremendous punch for the money, which hasn’t always been the case. NVIDIA’s new G94 chip is the heart of the GeForce 9600GT and a stripped down version of the NVIDIA G92 chip, used by both GeForce 8800GT and 8800GTS 512MB.
NVIDIA has reduced the number of shader processors, to 64 working at 1625MHz. The GPU has a clock frequency of 650MHz and the GDDR3 memory operates at 1800MHz.
Thanks to the 65nm manufacturing process and the low number of shader processors, GeForce 8800GTS houses 128 SP, 9600GT consumes relatively little power and remains cool, despite the simple cooler.
The first reviews of GeForce 9600GT are in and NVIDIA’s new mid-range card stands up well to the competition. It’s actually faster than Radeon HD 3870 which is actually more expensive. We have several GeForce 9600GT cards in the test lab and hopes to publish some benchmarks of our own soon, but until then we’ve gathered a couple of reviews below.
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