Zotac 9600GT 512MB

Josh Collins takes a look at NVIDIA’s latest and greatest. Is it the new budget king?

Another month and with that another new release from NVIDIA. This will either be welcomed with open arms or shunned with frustration by enthusiasts waiting for the long-delayed next top dog release. Either way, there’s no denying that NVIDIA is filling the bang-for-buck sector with attractive options and shamelessly hunting AMD’s blood, and the scalps of the HD3850 and HD3870 series. Further, this latest release brings is the first of the 9-series – the next generation in NVIDIA’s GeForce products.

Based on the G94 core and made on a 65nm manufacturing process, the 9600GT features 64 stream processors and 512MB of dedicated graphics memory that operates over a 256-bit memory bus. The number of total available stream processors is 50 per cent of that found on the 8800GTS 512MB, 57 per cent of that found on the 8800GT 512MB and 66 per cent of that found on the 8800GS 512MB. While these figures may sound low, they’re much higher than the previous mid-range offerings in the form of the 8600GT and 8600GTS, with the 9600GT sporting double the amount of stream processors from the 32 found in the 8600-series to the previously noted 64 within the G94 core for the 9600GT.

We’ve gone through the figures and we now know where the card sits in regards to stream processors, but this isn’t everything. A card can have a whole stack of stream processors available but unless there’s the raw grunt to push data through performance will be average to say the least. To assure there’s plenty of pushing power, the 9600GT sample we’ve tested from Zotac sports frequencies of 725MHz on the core, 1000MHz (2000MHz effective) on the memory and 1750MHz on the shaders.

Physically the 9600GT looks extremely similar to the 8800GT, based on the G92 core. Using the same single slot cooling solution and measuring in at the same length to boot, side by side even the PCBs look very similar. Nonetheless there are the technical intricacies that assure the difference between the two cards.

The new 45nm dual cores will no doubt start flooding the market by the time this is in your hands having a good read. Therefore we’ve chosen to step away from the usual use of a 65nm dual core clocked at 3.6GHz for testing and instead utilise a 45nm dual core processor clocked at 3.8GHz – all on air cooling.

As overclocks of 3.2GHz to 3.6GHz have been ‘standard’ 24/7 clocks for many of the 65nm chips residing in enthusiast systems, we strongly believe that clocks between 3.8GHz and 4.2GHz will become the new norm for the 45nm chips; as such testing has been performed at 3.8GHz with an overclocked FSB to 400MHz and using a 9.5x multiplier. Paired with this is a set of Corsair Dominator DDR3-1800 C7 memory tweaked to run at DDR3-1600 6-6-6-18 2T.

With the oh so ‘wonderful’ Vista Ultimate 32-bit installed, our glumness at dealing with such an OS was offset by watching the pretty gleam of the sun reflecting off of the ocean and the gentle shadows of the nearby palm trees found in Crysis. Running through our usual settings of 1280 x 1024 resolution and all the eye candy maxed out; the card recorded an average, minimum and maximum FPS result of 16.25, 12.46 and 18.87 respectively. Next the card was put through the 3DMark06 testing suite and pulled away with a confident 12,087 3DMarks. Not too shabby considering the card is set to be the mid-range product for the new 9-series product line.

At the time of writing, the necessary software to overclock the new release was not available. This means that for the time being we do not have any overclocking results for the card, but in truly Atomic fashion we’ll be juicing up this new arrival as soon as we have the chance!

The 9600GT marks the launch of the 9-series, however in a back-to-front fashion compared to the previous launches of the 6, 7 and 8 series. Considering the marketplace it is set to slot into, we feel this particular offering is a very solid start to a new series.