The performance is worse than it’s (giga)byte.
Puns are just wonderful things, and we can even call them punderful if you'd prefer. But something that isn't quite as punderiffic is this offering from EVGA, that means well, but somehow manages to miss the (3D)mark.
An oldschool green PCB has all the usual components you can expect to see, including solid caps and some ferrite chokes. You've got twin DVI ports, as well as the analogue video out, and the SLI tab is ready and rearing to be mated with another 9500GT for some salacious SLI action. The core is running at stock speeds, but this (as we'll see slightly later) is restricted heavily by the choice to use DDR2. There is a whole gigabyte of it, but sadly memory space isn't needed on a core this diminutive, and the extra bandwidth afforded by GDDR3 could have been used to great effect.
Cooling duties are dutifully handled by the small copper cooler, a slightly deformed rectangular-ish affair with a small green fan, and EVGA sticker over it. This is powered by a two-pin fan cable, so there's no option of controlling the fan's speed - instead it sits at a constant 61.6dBA. Granted, it does keep the temperatures low at 46 degrees idle and 54 load, but we'd have liked to see some measure of noise control used here.
Performance, as mentioned above, is hampered by the slower DDR2, holding the benchmark and gaming performance scores back noticeably. Data simply can't be fed into this core fast enough, hurting it badly in all the wrong places. The bundle isn't particularly exciting either, with just the basic cables and adaptors included, and the value seems rather low compared to the Zotac card that manages to give a passive cooler AND GDDR3 for the same or lower price.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012