Galaxy 9600GT Low Profile Low Power Review
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.
Hi. I think this is a great looking card. I would love to put in my machine (acer small form desktop, amd dual core, 4gb ddr2) But I worry about power load because my machine has a teeny tiny 220watt psu. I can’t and don’t want to upgrade because the psu is a proprietary acer form that I cant upgrade easily. It sucks.
What would I risk trying this card on my machine? How can I find out if this would be suitable for my situation? Thanks and great review!!
I think it should be fine
thanks!
Update:
Just got this card, put it in my small form Acer. It’s very snug and it gets really hot, but it seems to work fine. I drilled some extra holes in the case, but maybe I need some more. Right now it’s idling at 61 C after cooling off from a short time under load where it reached 80 C. I don’t know if this is normal or not. No crashes yet, but I guess I’ll continue to baby it a bit.
Thanks for this great article!
Update #2:
I’ve been using this card for a while with no problems, but recently it has been overheating.
The fan seems to come on and off, sound loud and strange, and generally run inconsistently. I’m not sure if there is a way for me to manually control the fan or if that would help.
Concerning GPU temperatures, sometimes, things are fine. The GPU temperature will stay at 50-60C while doing basic tasks, watching youtube videos, etc. No problem. Other times the temperature will rise to 90 C or more simply running Windows 7. Sometimes, with a load on the GPU, the temperature will rise to 125 C causing the card to shutdown. This will happen with loads from high resolution gaming or just youtube videos (not even fullscreen!). Then again other times, I can game for 45 minutes getting temperatures getting on up to 80 C with 75% fan speeds.
This is probably not the ideal place to post this, but since I posted here earlier, why not…
Mine did the same thing. The fan is buggered, noisy at first, then noticed when I had the lid off that when it wasn’t just noisy/vibrating but stalling and strugling to turn. I sent it back to supplier (you have to remove the heatsink held by tape to replace yourself thus voiding waranty) and 3months later I am about to get it back. Hope it does not do it again.
Oh and I used a manual controller as at high speeds it was quieter but in the end still faulty.