Unlike previous generations of graphics accelerators (think Radeon 9600XT, GeForce 4 MX) where creativity breeds competitive designs, today's graphics accelerators are all-too-often OEM offsprings. The dawn of a new chipset for NVIDIA will not attempt to stray from this safe trend; three of the four 9600GT graphics accelerators with us today are found with the P545 reference PCB design, complete with spoonfed component choices and layout.

Model Inno3D 9600GT 512MB Inno3D 9600GT 512MB Overclock
 Palit/Xpertvision 9600GT 512MB
 XFX 9600GT 512MB XXX Edition

Sapphire HD3850 512MB

 XFX 8800GS 384MB Alpha Dog XXX Edition
 Sparkle 8800GT 512MB Overclocked
Stream Processors 64 64 64 64 320 96 128
Fab Process 65nm 65nm 65nm 65nm 55nm 65nm 65nm
Core Clock (MHz) 650 700 700 700 668 575 675
Shader Clock (GHz) 1.625 1.625 1.75 1.75 - 1.35 1.728
Memory Clock (MHz) 1800 DDR 1900 DDR 2000 DDR 2000 DDR 1656 DDR 1700 DDR 1800 DDR
Memory Type GDDR3 GDDR3 GDDR3 GDDR3 GDDR3 GDDR3 GDDR3
Memory Interface 256bit 256bit 256bit 256bit 256bit 192bit 384bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) 57.6 57.6 57.6 57.6 52.99 40.8 86.4
Texture Fillrate (billion/sec) 20.8 20.8 20.8 20.8 10.688 27.6 36.8
Power Connector One One One One One One Two

Specifications wise, the 9600GT cards with us today share much similarities. Clockspeeds and features would decide the desirablity of these graphics accelerators. We've prepared a 7-way shootout for these cards. How they do on paper is shown in the above table. Like the 8800GT, the 9600GT comes with a 2-phase VRM, we will touch further on that later in the review. More on setup configuration in the following CPU-Z dump:

NVIDIA GeForce 9 9600GT G94 XFX Inno3D XpertVision Palit

Asus P5K3 Deluxe Inno3D 9600GT

CPU cooling was provided by a Swiftech Apogee GT looped in with a 2.120 heatercore and a LAING DC pump. Seagate 7200.7 80GB harddisks provided storage. Operating System was Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x86 with ForceWare 174.13 drivers.