Card appearance and thoughts
Head back to our look of the GeForce 9600 GT's architecture to see what it brings to the table.
As a brief recap, it's a DX10-toting GPU that's clocked in at 650/1,625/1,800MHz for the engine, shaders, and memory, respectively, and that's a little higher than the slightly dearer GeForce 8800 GT 512, with which it shares a 256-bit memory bus.
However, the 9600 GT packs in 64 stream processors compared to the 8800 GT's 112. The single-slot-taking card won't be quite as fast, but it does bring about an eclectic range of outputs, including HDMI (via audio hook-up) and DisplayPort, should partners wish to implement them.
The GeForce 9600 GT can be thought of as a fundamentally better replacement for the GeForce 8600 GTS, but not quite a GeForce 8800 GT 512. Confusing, huh?
Inno3D has raised the frequencies, noted above, to 700/1,680/1,900MHz for its OC model, which is one of six SKUs in its 9600 range. The frequencies are hard-wired into the BIOS, of course, requiring no user intervention, unless you want to go even higher.
The cooler remains a single-slot-taking version and is quiet in both 2D and 3D modes.
We like the fact that ~£100 cards are shipping with 512MiB of GDDR3 as standard - handy for higher resolutions and keeping the GPU from consistently streaming out to slower system memory through the PCIe 2.0 interface.
SLI is supported, obviously, and two of these cards would cost about as much as a GeForce 9800 GTX OC. The proviso is that you'd need a NVIDIA SLI-certified motherboard to run them.
NVIDIA's documentation asserts that the card pulls a TDP of 95W, and that's why you see the six-pin PCIe connector in situ. Given a matching range of components, a high-quality 450W PSU should be up to the job of powering the system.
Taking into account what we've said about the reference GeForce 9600 GT providing an array of outputs, it's somewhat strange to see Inno3D provide just two dual-link DVI ports. Additional adapters could be used to harness the benefits of HDMI. but that takes away from the intrinsic beauty of it, and none are supplied in the package.
Nothing special here, folks. The Inno3D is a mildly overclocked GeForce 9600 GT that currently ships with an £110 e-tail price.
