XFX 9600GSO

A card that is high on X, and life.

There has been a trend in recent years to remove the amount of X’s out of a product’s name. Thankfully there is one company who has stuck to their course, applying liberal amounts of X in a holistic way to thousands of graphics cards each month. But does increased X mean better performance?

This X, err, 9600GSO, is built around a cut-down version of the same G92 core that we’ve seen extensive use in the 8800GT and 9800GTX/+ series cards, so we know it’s got a little grunt under the hood. Running at a stock overclock of 680MHz on the core (130MHz over stock!!), and a memory speed of 950MHz, this card has the clocks that are destined to rock your socks. Of course, all the clockspeed in the world would mean absolutely nothing if they didn’t have a 192-bit memory bus keeping the hungry stream processors sated with delicious chunks of memory data, of which there is 384MBs worth of GDDR3 – plenty of space for gaming, albeit at lower resolutions.

We’d be lying if we told you that the card didn’t look good. From the black support bar running along the top side of the card (great for showing off all your Xs in a windowed case), to the matte black PCB, anodised dark grey PCI bracket, and black stock cooler. Thankfully, there’s also some colour here too, with acid-green DVI ports, and a stock cooler with a rather exciting number on it. The dinky little fan on the cooler doesn’t do a bad job of keeping temperatures or noise down either, with an idle of 62 degrees at 48.4dBA, and a load of 81 at 59.5dBA. This is a little on the toasty side of well done, but it’s probable that you’ll be able to wring a little extra performance out of this card without swapping to aftermarket cooling.

While we’re on the topic of performance, this card performs quite swimmingly in all of our tests – it’s just a shame that it performs at the level of an amateur swimmer (though this is expected due to its midrange nature). You’ll get a decent playing experience in Crysis and CoH, though you’ll have to turn the settings down in each if you’d like to have a rock-solid 30fps framerate.



The bundle for the card is quite decent as well, with a copy of 3DMark Vantage Advanced included (worth about US$20), as well as all the power cables, manual and driver CD. While a game would have been a handy inclusion over a benchmark, it’s still much better than nothing at all.

If you’re a gamer who wants a good, light, and relatively powerful LANing system, this card is a very good choice. If you’re a vain image-obsessed colour-coordinating person, then this card is also good for you (and will go well with the drapes). What you won’t find here is the best performance. If you’re serious about performance, you’re going to have to look elsewhere.