In the past, ATI and Nvidia have tended to announce a new generation of GPUs with huge fanfare and a display of a powerful, high-end model to show off the new technology. It's hoped that this approach creates a halo effect, so people associate the new series with top-of-the-range performance. However, Nvidia seems to be obsessed with the £100-200 graphics card market at the moment, selling not only the GeForce 8800 GT range, but also a new GeForce 8800 GS GPU. It therefore isn't a complete surprise that the first GeForce 9-series GPU is a mid-range chip.
The GeForce 9600 GT has 64 stream processors that run at 1.625GHz. The core of the GPU is clocked at 650MHz, and there's a 256-bit memory interface to talk to the 512MB of 900 MHz (1.8GHz effective) GDDR3 memory. This puts the GeForce 9600 GT up against the 256MB and 512MB GeForce 8800 GT cards, but Zotac has applied a massive overclock to persuade you that this card is the one to buy.
Zotac has overclocked every part of this card, boosting the core from 650MHz to 725MHz, the stream processors from 1.625GHz to 1.75GHz, and the memory from 900MHz (1.8GHz effective) to 1GHz (2GHz effective). The question is whether the clock increases will compensate for the 9600GT AMP! having only 64 stream processors, while the £125 256MB and £140 512MB GeForce 8800 GT cards have 112 stream processors.
Both the 256MB and the 512MB GeForce 8800 GT cards can handle Call of Duty 4 at 1,680 x 1,050, delivering smooth minimum frame rates of 27fps and 37fps respectively. The 9600GT AMP! falls in between these two - as its price suggests - with a minimum of 31fps and an average of 46fps. For a few pounds more than the 256MB GeForce 8800 GT, you get an extra 4fps with the 9600GT AMP!, but the 512MB GeForce 8800 GT offers an extra 6fps for around £5 more.
We saw the same kind of differences in Need for Speed: Pro Street, with the 9600GT AMP! performing in between the two GeForce 8800 GT cards. All three cards managed a smooth minimum frame rate of more than 25fps at our highest test resolution (1,920 x 1,200), with the 256MB GeForce 8800 GT scoring 26fps, the 9600GT AMP! 31fps and the 512MB GeForce 8800 GT 36fps. Again, spending the extra cash on the 512MB GeForce 8800 GT buys you a noticeable increase in speed, while the lower price of the 256MB GeForce 8800 GT doesn't mean having to drop to a lower resolution to achieve a smooth minimum frame rate.
The hazy, tropical landscape of Crysis has proved time and again to be a hostile and unforgiving environment for graphics cards, so we were impressed when the 9600GT AMP! managed a playable minimum frame rate of 26fps at 1,024 x 768. The 256MB GeForce 8800 GT falls short of this, with a minimum frame rate of 24fps in the same test. However, the 512MB GeForce 8800 GT is far more accomplished than either card at playing Crysis, with a minimum of 32fps, so the extra cash it costs nets you an appreciable 6fps boost.
Unfortunately, we couldn't persuade any overclocking tool to recognise the 9600GT AMP!, and were therefore unable to squeeze any extra speed from it. We also became a little annoyed at the whooshy fan on the cooler as it struggled to keep the card cool. Reference fans on 256MB or 512MB GeForce 8800 GT cards are slightly more polite. The noisy fan is surprising, as the power draw of our test PC with the 9600GT AMP! installed was 289W, while it drew 307W with the 512MB GeForce 8800 GT. With the 256MB GeForce 8800 GT installed, our test PC consumed 269W of power.
ConclusionQuite why Nvidia has released the GeForce 9600 GT right now is beyond us, as the GeForce 8800 GT covers the same mid-range ground perfectly well. Perhaps the GeForce 8800 GT isn't as profitable or as easy to manufacture as the 9600 GT, or the company feels the 8-series brand is tired; it might even be a fear of the ever-cheaper Radeon HD3850. Regardless of the reasoning, it's a good GPU. Unfortunately for Zotac, at the time of writing , its card is priced a touch too high to be the strongest contender in its price range. The cheaper XpertVision 9600 GT is a better buy.
Author: Chris Lee
Zotac GeForce 9600GT AMP! Edition