The A-listed
Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT has only been on the shelves for a couple of months, but overclocked versions are already appearing. BFG's effort, however, offers only small improvements to justify the extra investment.
BFG has gone for a conservative approach with its first revision of the 9600 chipset. The core clock has seen an increase of just 25MHz, to 675MHz, and the shader clock has been boosted by 75MHz to 1800MHz.
Apart from this, everything has been left as standard - there isn't any additional RAM to help the boosted core and shader clocks reach higher levels of performance, and 64 stream processors remain from the original GPU.
We compared the OC to a standard card in our test rig - an Asus Maximus Extreme motherboard, Core 2 Extreme X9770 3.2GHz processor and 2GB of DDR3 RAM. Our Crysis benchmarks showed, at most, a 2fps improvement - the low test jumped from 136 to 138fps, and the medium benchmark from 51 to 53fps. The high benchmark jumped a mere frame, from 21 to 22fps.
Our Call of Juarez demo produced similar results, adding only a couple of frames to the standard card's score. The medium and high tests were even less impressive - neither managed to add even a single frame to the scores achieved by the stock 9600 GT.
The Nvidia G94 core may have great overclocking potential, but BFG's conservative approach hasn't realised it. The boosts achieved here will be practically unnoticeable during a gaming session, and a bit of tweaking with Nvidia's ntune could easily reap the same reward. With this in mind, we see no reason to spend an extra £15 for this overclocked card.
System Specifications
Nvidia Geforce 9600 GT GPU, 675MHz core clock, 1700MHz shader clock, 512MB GDDR3 memory, 1800MHz memory data rate, 64 stream processors, HDCP & HDMI compatible, DirectX 10 compatible.
Verdict
A couple of fps quicker than a standard 9600 GT, but not worth the extra cash.
Author: Mike Jennings
PC Pro Online