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Review: XFX GeForce 9600 GSO XXX - mid-range monster or crippled competitor?

by Michael Harries on 24 September 2008, 08:07

Tags: XFX 9600 GSO XXX 384MB, NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), XFX (HKG:1079)

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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars - 1,280x1,024 - 4xAA 16xAF
ZOTAC 9600GTXFX 9600 GSOSapphire HD 4670 512Inno3D 9800 GT
74.646.3364.5385.07

Our Enemy Territory: Quake Wars benchmark brought up a few problems for two of the cards on test.

The XFX 9600 GSO XXX 384MB came back with inconsistent results on multiple attempts, with results ranging from 52.2 to 69.1fps - a huge 24% variance. This would seem to be due to the limited memory capacity and the game needing to cache out to main memory or HDD. As such the results for the stock-clocked 9600 GSO are also likely plagued by the same problem.

The Sapphire HD 3850 256MB fared even worse, and would continuously crash out of the game, leaving us unable to complete the benchmark.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars - 1,680x1,050 - 4xAA 16xAF
ZOTAC 9600GTSapphire HD 4670 512Inno3D 9800 GT
58.9349.9767.3

Things were no better at 1,680x1,050 as the XFX 9600 GSO XXX still showed, again, massive variances amongst runs, achieving between 38.3 and 50.5 fps. The stock-clocked 9600 GSO also exhibited the same behaviour, achieving between 33.9 and 42.7 fps, confirming our earlier suspicions.

Yet again, the Radeon HD 3850 256MB would not complete the benchmark.