Palit - GeForce 9600GT Sonic 512MB review

The last round of high-end graphics card launches saw plenty of cards at the top end, but nothing to speak of in the highly lucrative mainstream market. True, both ATI and Nvidia attempted to redress the situation with the HD2600 and GeForce 8600, but neither really cut the mustard in the mid-range market.

It wasn't until the launch of Nvidia's GeForce 8800GT (G92) that a mainstream card appeared that was worthy of the name, swiftly followed by ATI's HD3870 and HD3850 and a whole range of pricing policies.

Now Nvidia is back with the first of the next generation of graphics cards, the Geforce 9 series, the first of which is the 9600GT. And unlike nearly every other launch of a new desktop graphics core in recent memory, the first example of the new generation isn't some pixel-blasting high-end card but rather a new addition to the mid-range market sector. The reason for this lies in what powers the 9600GT; the G94 core, not some huge, power-hungry chip but the smaller, cut-down sibling of the G92 used by the 8800GT and GTS.

Built on a 65nm process, the G94 has 505 million transistors - some 250 million less than the G92 - and has only 64 stream processors (the 8800GT has 112) but they are clocked higher at 1,625MHz (the same as an 8800GTS). The 512MB of GDDR3 runs via a 256-bit interface and, together with the standard memory clock speed of 900MHz (1,800MHz effective), gives the 9600GT a memory bandwidth of 57.60Gbps.

Palit's Sonic range is the home of the company's overclocked cards and the 9600GT Sonic carries on the family tradition by having a core engine running 50MHz over the reference speed at 700MHz, while the memory clock has been tweaked to run the 512MB of GDDR3 at 1GHz (2GHz effective), which is 100MHz faster than standard.

Palit has done away with the reference cooler and instead used an attractive, gold coloured radial cooler, the height of which makes the card a two-slot design; which is handy once you see the ports on the expansion plate, a very impressive array given the price of the card.

First off there are two stacked Dual Link DVI ports, to the right of which sits an optical S/PDIF port (a cable for which is supplied) while to the left and under the cooling grille sit two surprises. The first of these is an HDMI port while the other port is for a DisplayPort output. Palit's 9600GT is the first card we have seen with this.

Performance-wise the 9600GT Sonic doesn't hang about and, given its price point, it's impressive. Tested with World in Conflict's built-in demo, the card gave an average frame rate score of 57fps at a 1,280 by 1,024 pixel resolution. And when it comes to the modern day slayer of graphics cards, namely Crysis, it holds up quite well, giving a score of 49fps when tested at the same 1,280 by 1,024 resolution.