Galaxy 9600GT Low Profile Low Power Review
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.
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.