Shootouts

Finding the Mid-range Sweet Spot - GeForce 9600 GT Showdown

By Vincent Chang - 28 Feb 2008

Test Setup

Test Setup

Like all our graphics benchmarking, the nine GeForce 9600 GT cards were tested on an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz) machine with an Intel D975XBX motherboard. This system has 2GB of low latency Kingston HyperX memory (DDR2-800) and is also equipped with a Seagate 7200.7 SATA hard drive. We used Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 and updated to DirectX 9.0c. Below are all the cards tested in this roundup, comparing their clock speeds (default clocks are 650/1800MHz) and the estimated retail prices where available. Those listed in US dollars are generally not found locally.

GeForce 9600 GT Specifications Cheat Sheet
Graphics Card Core Clock Memory Clock Stream Processor Clock Estimated Retail Price
ASUS EN9600 GT 650MHz 1800MHz DDR 1625MHz S$299
Gigabyte GV-NX96T512H-B 650MHz 1800MHz DDR 1625MHz S$299
Leadtek WinFast PX9600 GT Extreme 720MHz 1800MHz DDR 1750MHz S$309
Palit GeForce 9600GT Sonic 700MHz 2000MHz DDR 1750MHz US$210
Sparkle GeForce 9600 GT 512MB 660MHz 1800MHz DDR 1700MHz US$249
XFX GeForce 9600 GT 512MB XXX 700MHz 2000MHz DDR 1750MHz S$319
XpertVision GeForce 9600GT Sonic 700MHz 2000MHz DDR 1750MHz S$309
Zotac GeForce 9600 GT AMP! Edition 725MHz 2000MHz DDR 1750MHz ~US$208

We used ForceWare 174.12 for all these cards, a beta version of the just released 174.16 WHQL candidate from NVIDIA. There shouldn't be any significant performance difference between the two and we tested the GeForce 9600 GT cards here in our usual benchmarks, using the included time demos and other built-in benchmarking tools available in these games. This list is as follows:

  • Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver 110)
  • Company of Heroes (ver 1.3)
  • F.E.A.R (ver 1.0)
  • World in Conflict (ver 1.05)
  • Supreme Commander (patched to 3255)
  • Crysis (ver 1.1)
  • Unreal Tournament 3 (ver 1.1)
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