Galaxy 9600GT Low Profile Low Power Review
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 |
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.