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Introduction

The 9600XT is no stranger to our lab having reviewed ATi's reference solution here as well as pitting it against Nvidia's 5700 Ultra in an epic battle here. In both cases we came away impressed with the performance of the XT. Today we take a look at Gigabyte's 9600XT, the aptly named R96XT. Gigabyte has not been a stranger to our lab either with their 5950 as well as an uniquely engineered cooler.

A recent trend in video card manufacturing is the lack of exclusivity when producing cards. Many of the major OEMs produce cards with both Nvidia and ATI solutions and Gigabyte is clearly one of them with us having reviewed products from both their Nvidia and ATi lineup. This trend is likely to continue as ATI is also dipping their fingers into the mainboard chipset market (their products will not compete directly against Nvidia's as the ATI 9100 IGP chipset being a P4 solution where as the NForce2/3 are AMD solutions). It is interesting to note that Gigabyte produces cards from nearly every chip from both companies. At the high end, Gigabyte has both 9800 XTs and 5950s and in the mid range segment here, we have the 9600XT, 5700 Ultra, and 5900 XT. This is a very aggressive stance for Gigabyte; not only are they competing with other OEMS but they are also competing with themselves in the same market segment at every level. If more of the larger OEMs adopt this stance it could make things very difficult for the second tier OEMs who traditionally do not have the resources to push multiple products in the same price range. Hopefully we will see companies get very specialized in terms of engineering (like Gainward) or have top notch technical support (like BFG). The burden of promoting chipsets will be focused more on Nvidia and ATI as OEMs will have less incentive to push a certain card since they would be promoting both. This is especially important as we are at a time when they are many chipsets that overlap in price/performance. On the Nvidia side alone we have the 5700, 5700 Ultra, 5900 Non Ultra, 5900 XT all in the same general price range.