Galaxy 9600GT Low Profile Low Power Review
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.
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.