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.