Introduction

9600 GT was introduced at a time when Nvidia’s 8800 GT was a revelation for the mainstream and showed what a $250 card could do.  Soon after, AMD/ATI introduced HD3800 series at $179 and $219 price points to counter 8800GT’s dominance in the market.  9600 GT was thus born as a result of Nvidia’s attempt to compete with the newly introduced HD 3800 series, and in the end it ended up trading blows with HD 3870. This price segment is a sweet spot for graphic card sales and the manufacturers realize this.  You can easily get a HD4870 1GB or a GTX 260-216 for less than $200 in this price segment these days.

Lately, a green revolution has overtaken the industry.   Every manufacturer is trying to come up with some green product that consumes less power.  Nvidia has recently announced their green lineup of cards. These cards use the normal models but reduce the stock frequencies to lower power consumption. As a result, we see cards without external power connectors that draw all the needed power from the PCI-Express slot. The 9600 GT that we are testing was sent to us by Galaxy and is a “Green” 9600 GT.  This card is a low-profile design which should also be ideal for HTPC’s.

Galaxy, established in 1994, is a Nvidia Add-in-Board (AIB) partner which manufactures products from the low-end GeForce 7200 series to the high-end GTX200 series. They manufacture products based on Nvidia’s reference design as well as using their own in-house production facilities to manufacture graphic cards based on their own designs using high-end coolers from Arctic Cooling and others.

Galaxy has shipped to the US for a long time as they built video cards for many of the tier 1 brands in the market today. They realized they could create a brand for themselves and save the end customer the middleman fees.  Two years ago they launched Galaxy in the US and their products are now available at Best Buy, Microcenter, Fry’s, Dell.com, Newegg, TigerDirect and many other sites.  They have excellent quality and toll-free tech support with a 2 year transferable no-registration warranty.

Let's take a look at what I am reviewing today:

If you have any questions regarding the review, please post them in this forum thread.

Specifications

9600 GT has the honor of being the first GPU from the 9-series of the GeForce lineup. Although 9600 GT is based on the G94 chip, which is basically the same as 8800GT’s G92 chip with reduced shaders, still it is named a 9-series card. The G94 GPU is manufactured on a 65nm process and packs 64 Shaders, while 8800GT’s G92 has 112.  Nvidia’s previous mainstream card 8600GT, has 32 shaders.  9600 GT usually comes in 512MB or 256 MB flavors on a  256-bit wide memory bus. It features a unified shader design and support for Shader Model 4.0, meaning that it's fully DirectX 10 compliant.

	GeForce 9600 GT	GeForce 9600 GT “Green”	GeForce 8800 GT	GeForce 8600 GT
GPU	G94	G94	G92	G84
Core Clock Speed	650 MHz	600 MHz	600 MHz	540 MHz
Shader Clock Speed	1625 MHz	1500 MHz	1500 MHz	1180 MHz
Memory Clock Speed	900 MHz	900 MHz	900 MHz	700 MHz
Manufacturing Process	65nm	65nm	65nm	80nm
Stream Processors	64	64	112	32
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	128-bit
TDP	96W	59W	105W	43W
Transistors	505M	505M	754M	289M

Packaging and Accessories

Galaxy’s 9600 GT Low Profile Low Power comes in a fairly large box compared to the card’s size. The box features a tiger on its cover, which is a relief from all the mech warriors and CG women with swords on some of the boxes from other manufacturers. I would like to mention here that although the box says that this card is SLI ready, it is infact NOT as you will see later in the review.

The box design and labeling is an important part of catching the consumer’s attention in retail locations especially now that Galaxy sells its cards in Best Buy stores. The box labels the features of the card pretty clearly.  It advertises the 2-year warranty that comes with the card and a toll-free number, should you have any technical difficulties with the card.  It's nice to see Galaxy mention the power supply requirements on the box and the ideal use of such low height cards - i.e. HTPCs (Home Theater Personal Computer). Another nice feature is the mention that a standard height adapter is included. This will ensure that people with regular PCs are not turned off from buying this card off retail shelves.

On opening the box, a yellow flyer greets you.  Included on it is a tech support number and email if you have a problem with the card.  Although most vendors give a certain time for return if your purchase is out of this time period, you can still setup a RMA with Galaxy by using this email or the toll-free number.

Included accessories are: driver CD, installation manual, HDMI installation guide, user manual, SPDIF cable, DVI-VGA Adapter. In the above screen you see the Low Profile Bracket which was taken off from the card to fit it in a normal mid-tower case. Its pretty easy to fit the card with the included standard height bracket. Its just a matter of loosening 2 screws.

Eye Candy: The Card Exterior

Let’s have a look at Galaxy's GT 9600.

The card comes wrapped in an anti-static bag. On taking it out, its quite a surprise how small this card is, especially if you are used to large cards like GTX 285 or HD 4870-X2. The length of the card is 8.5 inches. This will allow it to fit in most cases without the worry of obscircuitrytructing the hard drive cables.

This card features a single-slot cooler with half-height PCB.  There is no external 6-pin power connector, hence the name “Low Power Low Profile”.  This card will also make a perfect card for PhysX due to these qualities. The fan doesn’t look like it can cool much but we will find that out later.

Here is the side profile on the card and the back of the PCB.

Output options include native HDMI port plus a DVI port. Users with HTPC’s would appreciate the presence of a HDMI port on here.

Eye Candy:The Card Interior

Lets take off the cooler and see what the card looks like naked !

This card uses 8 GDDR3 memory chips, each is 64 MB. These are SAMSUNG K4J523240H-HJ1A rated at 1ns and good to work up to 1000MHz.

The heatsink is one large copper block having copper fins on the other side. The fan pushes air between these fins cooling the copper block and thus the GPU. As the air exits out of these fins, it passes over the aluminum heatsink covering the power phase inductors and MOSFETs. Thus the fan serves a dual purpose of cooling the the GPU and the power circuitry of the video card.

However it would have been better if the fan pushed the air the other way to exhaust out of the case. This might be a problem for people who might not have good cooling in their case.

Here is the close look at the stock thermal compound applied. Note that in the picture on the right the compound has dried off. It Looks like a pretty even application, covering the whole GPU. Some enthusiasts might even say that its too much.

Lets take a look at the power circuitry design of this card. After taking off the aluminum heatsink (seen in the background in the image on the left), it is clear that this card uses a 2+1 phase power circuit design (shown by the three large power inductors that say “1R0”) , each phase can supply a maximum of 30A. Each power inductor is connected to 3 MOSFETs (small black chips to right). There are a total of 9 MOSFETs - 6 on the front and 3 on the back of the PCB.

And now let’s take a look at the GPU itself.

All cleaned and shiny now, we see that this is a 55nm GPU(shown by the ending B1 on the codename). Perhaps all the “Green” Nvidia video cards make use of 55nm GPUs to achieve lower power consumption.

Software and Test System Used

Let’s start things off with a couple of screens from the GPU-Z and CPU-Z system info utilities.

Test System :

Intel Q9450 @ 3.2GHz

GIGABYTE EX-38 DS4

GeIL 4GB(2x2GB) 800MHz RAM 5-4-4-12

Zerotherm Nirvana 120mm CPU Cooler

Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music

2 x Western Digital 6400AAKS 640GB SATA Hard Drives

1 x SAMSUNG 22X DVD±R SATA DVD Burner

Windows Vista SP1 x64

Cooler Master Silent Pro 600M PSU

Cooler Master Sniper Case (both kindly supplied by Cooler Master)

Video Cards used

Galaxy 9600 GT 512MB

Palit 9800 GT 1GB

Nvidia GeForce 185.66 Drivers used.

All settings in the control panel were left at default.

PhysX on GeForce GPU’s was disabled.

All games were patched to their latest versions.

Overclocking

To be honest, I didn’t think that this card would overclock much, given its tiny cooler and no 6-pin connector.  But I was proved wrong as you will see in a few scrolls down.

Starting with a Furmark test running in the background, I started overclocking with Rivatuner, 15MHz at a time.  I kept on increasing the clocks until Furmark showed artifacts. The fan on the card was running at 100% (manually controlled).

Starting from the stock clocks of  600/1500/900 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory), I reached 716/1850/1107 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory).  That’s a 19.3/23.3/23 % overclock on Core/Shader/Memory. Pretty solid, I would say for such a small card.  This should help it get into 8800 GT/9800 GT performance territory.

One thing I would like to note here is that, this card lowers its clocks to 300/600/100 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory) in 2D Mode to achieve low power consumption.

Note that GPU-Z requests clocks from the driver, but Rivatuner’s Hardware Monitoring module requests clocks from the hardware itself which is accurate.  Thus GPU-Z clocks and Rivatuner clocks differ slightly.

Temperature and Power Consumption

To measure maximum temperature and power consumption, we again turn back to Furmark. Furmark represents the one of the most intensive tests a GPU can undertake. Thus temperatures and power consumption measured with Furmark represent the worst-case scenario. Although no game today puts as much load on the GPU as Furmark does, should a game do that in future, you will be ready armed with the knowledge gained by testing with Furmark - knowing how hot your card can get and how much power it can consume.

The core voltage on the GPU  is lowered from 1.1V to 1V to save power.

Here are the settings used:

Note: AA is not used as it causes the cards to use less power. Power consumption is of the whole system.

Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark’s 3DMark series of benchmarks is the darling benchmark of the enthusiast crowd. Although it doesn’t provide real world gameplay indication, it is still a good indicator of system performance and can help determine if something is wrong.

3DMark06 is a PC benchmark suite designed to test the DirectX9 performance of your graphics card. 3DMark06 is the most downloaded benchmark and the ORB database of 3DMark 06 results, maintained by Futuremark, now contains over 8.5 million 3DMark06 benchmark scores from around the world. Three main graphic tests from 3DMark05 were carried over to 3DMark06 and updated. The tests included in 3DMark 06 feature HDR rendering, shadow mapping, water surfaces created using pixel shaders with HDR refraction, HDR reflection, depth fog and Gerstner wave functions, heterogeneous fog, light scattering and cloud blending, etc.

The overclocking really makes a difference here.  9600 GT gets really close to 9800 GT. We will see later if this translates into any increase in gaming performance.

3DMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed to test the DirectX10 performance of your graphics card. It is the latest addition to the 3DMark series. As it is a DX10-only benchmark, it only runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7. 3DMark Vantage is composed of four full-bore benchmarking tests (2 CPU tests and 2 GPU tests) and 6 feature tests. This test makes good use of multi-core CPUs and can even use Nvidia’s PhysX technology on its GeForce lineup of video cards.

This test repeats the trend 9600 GT set in the 3DMark06 test.

Let's move to games and see how this card does.

Race Driver: GRID is the latest addition to the TOCA Touring Car series by Codemasters. GRID is a hybrid between arcade and simulator of mainly road racing that consists of 43 cars featuring very fast racing, awesome graphics, along with a great damage model that leads to some of the most fantastic crashes we have seen in a game.  There are several types of competitions for different cars: GT races, open wheel races, demolition derbies, etc.  There are also several tracks from different countries, including Japan, United States and European tracks, such as Le Mans and Spa Francorchamps.  A track racing through the streets of Milan is also available.

Here are the settings we used:

Here are the results:

9600 GT provides pretty smooth gameplay in this game. With everything maxed out and with 4AA enabled, it plays the game without a hitch. When overclocked, it gets close to 9800 GT but doesn’t quite equal it.

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. ("High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron") is an aerial warfare video game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft.  Players have the opportunity to take the throttle of over 50 famous aircraft and take them over real world locations and cities in photo-realistic environments created with satellite data. This game is a more of an arcade take on flying, with the aircraft able to do drifts in mid air like a car does on the road. The controls are easy with the aircraft handling more like a car but it is an immensely fun game.

Settings Used:

Finally our OCing is showing its mettle here. When overclocked, a 9600 GT gives about the same performance as a 9800 GT at its stock frequencies.

Call of Juarez is one of the earliest DirectX10 games from the Polish developer Techland. It is a First Person Shooter set in the Wild West, loosely based on a number of Western movie hits which were popular in the sixties and early seventies. Call of Juarez uses the Chrome Engine which utilizes modern game programming technologies and techniques such as  High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering, Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapping, relief mapping, self-shadowing using ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering simulating diffusion and diffraction of rays finding their way through translucent objects; realistic water surfaces based on dynamic liquid system, real time HDR refections and refraction, fading underwater visibility based on distance.

We used the benchmark tool that is added to the game with the patch 1.1.1.0. Here are the settings used:

Here when overclocked, 9600 GT again matches 9800 GT.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky is the second game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. It is a stand-alone prequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl. The game consists of a roughly 50/50 mix of new areas and old, remodeled areas from the previous game. The X-ray graphics engine, originally used in S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl, has been updated to version 1.5 and includes DirectX 10 support. With patch 1.5.06 the game now supports DirectX 10.1 available on ATI video cards. Additionally, the AI received an overhaul to accommodate the new faction wars feature. Advancements made in 1.5 include volumetric light (a.k.a. 'God-rays'), volumetric smoke, volumetric fire, soft water, dynamic wet surfaces (with water streaming down the sides of surfaces), depth-of-field blur, DirectX 10 support, SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) and more.

I used the 12 minute, stand-alone “official” benchmark by Clear Sky’s creators.

Here are the settings used:

Although Clear Sky may offer lower performance with AA enabled, we wanted to utilize as much of the card as possible.

This game is very tough on graphic cards. Although we see an improvement on overclocking 9600 GT, it is not able to keep up with 9800 GT. The extra shaders of 9800 GT show their power in this game.

Company of Heroes is a real-time strategy game (RTS) developed by Relic Entertainment. Company of Heroes is set during World War II where the player commands two U.S. military units during the Battle of Normandy and the Allied capture of France. It makes use of the “Essence Engine”, developed in-house by Relic. This engine makes use of special graphical effects, including high dynamic range lighting, dynamic lighting & shadows, advanced shader effects and normal mapping. Company of Heroes also utilizes the Havok physics engine.

The in-game performance benchmark was used for this test and the results are taken from what is reported by this benchmark at its conclusion. All the latest patches were applied. Here is the settings screen:

This game is not much of a task for today’s graphic cards. Even a 9600 GT without any overclocking is able to play it pretty smoothly. Once overclocked it again comes pretty close to 9800 GT performance.

World in Conflict is a real-time strategy video game developed by the Swedish video game company Massive Entertainment. The story follows alternate reality Earth where the Cold War did not end and Russia won in 1989. The game is set after Russia invaded the USA and the remaining Americans decide to strike back. World in Conflict uses the MassTech Engine which  includes DX9 and DX10 renderers, particle systems, vegetation and water rendering and also physics and animation. It is a fast engine, which allows tons of units to be rendered with high realism. The engine was custom made for the game. It handles the rendering of many of the individual elements of the game to make it as realistic as possible like buildings, green stuff, and clouds.

Everything was maxed out. Here are the settings screens:

This is one of the few games that makes good use of multi-core CPUs. Here an overclocked 9600 GT is able to keep up with 9800 GT.

Lost Planet Extreme Condition: Colonies Edition is a gold edition version of Lost Planet:Extreme Condition developed and published by Capcom for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC. It has the honor of being the first DirectX10 game. The Colonies Edition includes new multiplayer maps, a Human vs Akrid multiplayer mode, and a selection of new multiplayer characters and weapons. The benchmark areas are also different from the non-colonies edition.

The game uses the MT Framework Engine. MT stands for "Multi-Thread", "Meta Tools" and "Multi-Target".

1280x960 was the max resolution available. I used the Area 1 for the benchmark purposes. All other settings were maxed out. Here are the screens

Lost Planet is another game that is CPU limited and uses less GPU at lower resolutions.  As such, an overclocked 9600 GT is able to overcome a 9800 GT.

Far Cry 2 is an free roaming first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. Although it uses the name of the original of the original Far Cry game, the similarities end right there. Far Cry 2 is a complete different story set in a completely different environment.

Far Cry 2 uses the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft's Montreal development team for Far Cry 2.  Dunia means "world", "earth" or "living" in Arabic but also used in many languages with Arabic loanwords including Punjabi, Persian, Nepali, Bengali, Hindi, Indonesian, Kurdish, Turkish, Malay, Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marvadi and Swahili.  To portray the African setting in the game as realistically as possible the development team went to Africa to study how things work there. The engine features Dynamic Weather, Dynamic fire propagation (influenced by weather system), Realistic Fire, Physics, Full day/night cycles. Realistic Fire is a high point of this game. It is the best looking depiction of a fire in a video game to date. The engine takes advantage of DirectX9 and DirectX 10 technologies.

I used the benchmark tool that comes with the game. Here are the settings screen:

Once again overclocked 9600 GT is pretty closed to a 9800 GT. Even an overclocked  9600 GT can provide pretty playable framerates with 4AA at highest quality in one of the best looking games of last year. This goes to show how much performance this card packs and in the sub-$100 price segment in general.

Crysis series is one of the most beautiful set of games to grace our PC screens to date and they can bring the highest end PCs to their knees.

Crysis Warhead, developed by Crytek, is an expansion to the original Crysis. Crysis Warhead follows Sergeant Michael “Psycho” Sykes, a formerly Non-Playable Character (NPC) from the original Crysis, as he faces his own trials and challenges on the other side of the island which is during the time period of the first game.

HardwareOC Bench tool was used for benchmarking purposes.   The demo was run 3 times, with the first result discarded.  Here are the settings used:

We are using the highest settings in this game. As a result, smooth gameplay is not possible. But it provides an apples-to-apples comparison of how the two cards fare. Overclocked 9600 GT is again very close to 9800 GT.

Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare was one of the most successful games of 2007.  It was the top-selling game worldwide for 2007, selling over seven million copies by January 2008. It uses a proprietary game engine that includes features such as true world-dynamic lightning, HDR lighting effects, dynamics shadows, and depth of field. It features a fictional story set in the near-future. The most well-received part of the game is its multiplayer modes, where you earn experience points for kills and completing certain tasks online. These experience points unlock certain abilities and new and more powerful guns which can tip the balance in your favor in online matches.

For testing this game, I recorded a timedemo on the “Creek” map while playing online. The demo was played back at normal speed with the demo command from the console and the results were recorded by FRAPS.

Here are the settings used:

Both of these cards can play this game at its highest quality without a hitch. Overclocked 9600 GT continues what it does best, provide near 9800 GT performance.

Team Fortress 2 is a team-based first-person shooter multiplayer video game developed by Valve.  A sequel to Valve's previous Team Fortress Classic, it was first released as part of the video game compilation The Orange Box, which featured games like Half Life 2:Episode 2 and Portal. Team Fortress 2 is focused around two opposing teams competing for an objective. Players can choose to play as one of nine classes in these teams, each with his own unique strengths and weaknesses.

Here are the settings used:

This game is extremely CPU limited. As such, there is not a lot of difference between the cards here.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, previously known as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Oblivion Lost, is a first-person shooter computer game by Ukrainian developer GSC Game World, published in 2007. It features an alternate reality theme, where a second nuclear disaster occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the near future and causes strange changes in the area around it. It features a non-linear storyline which feature role-playing gameplay elements such as trading and allying with NPC factions. The player assumes the identity of a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.; an illegal artifact scavenger in “The Zone” which encompasses roughly 30 square kilometers.

We are using a custom recorded timedemo for benchmark purposes. The Steam version of this game is used. Here are the settings used:

Both cards don’t even break a sweat playing this game.

Video Playback

NVIDIA's PureVideo is a hardware feature designed to offload video decoding processes and video post-processing from the CPU to the GPU. NVIDIA's device drivers for Windows XP and Windows Vista are PureVideo-enabled.  With the appropriate (PureVideo-enabled) application software, the NVIDIA driver will automatically use whatever hardware-acceleration is available on the NVIDIA GPU. This functionality can help slower CPU’s to be able to play FullHD(1920x1080) content without causing any stuttering issues. The software that offer this functionality are WinDVD, PowerDVD, Arcsoft Total Media Theater which you would have to buy in order to use the acceleration. Free software such as Media Player Classic Home Cinema can also use GPU acceleration. As this card could be used for a HTPC-gaming rig, we decided to check out its FullHD video playback capabilities.

I used Media Player Classic Home Cinema for the playback. The video used was the trailer of movie “The International” available from Divx 7 HD showcase Webpage. This is a 12.3 Mbps 1920x816 video. Here’s the image with video info

This screens show the CPU Usage when played in Windows Media Player using ffdshow decoders.

This screen shows the same CPU Usage in Rivatuner’s Hardware Monitor

Now lets see the CPU usage when the GPU does the decoding. Same video, played in Media Player Classic Home Cinema using GPU decoding.

And this is the CPU usage in Rivatuner’s Hardware monitor.

The difference is amazing, isn’t it?  This feature can allow you to spend less money on a CPU while making a HTPC, because now you know that your GPU would be able to do most of the decoding, keeping the CPU free.

Conclusion

To say that I underestimated Galaxy 9600GT would be an understatement in itself. Barring a few games, this card managed to keep up or close to the faster 9800 GT when it was overclocked. The main use of this card would be for casual gamers or budget gamers playing at a resolution of 1280x1024 or 1440x900 and for a HTPC that needs to have decent gaming capabilities. For those purposes this card is perfect, providing smooth gameplay  in almost all games except the most demanding - i.e. Crysis Warhead and Clear Sky.  Gamers could sacrifice a few quality settings and AA to get smoother gameplay in these and other games, if desired.

Galaxy has taken a good mainstream video card with a good price to performance ratio, and made it smaller, removing the power connector and giving their customers a  better price to performance and features ratio than before.

Pros-

Single Slot

Quiet Cooler even at full load

No external power connector

Perfect card for PhysX

Cons-

Cooler exhausts air into the case

We are happy to give this card Alien Babel Tech "Great Value" Award.

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