Related Articles

Impressions

The Palit 9600GSO Sonic shares a few similarities with the Palit 9600 GT Sonic which we reviewed in February. One feature making a return is the eye-catching orange plastic covering around the video card.

The covering is flat-sided and rectangular, and has both pros and cons. On the pro side, the shroud isn't a solid, unbreathing covering (such as found on some recent NVIDIA reference design coolers) -- instead, the plastic cover has many horizontal openings that both helps air circulate over the card's PCB, while at the same time, allowing hot air many possible escape routes. Additionally, this plastic shroud (or as some describe it, a plastic 'cage')  wouldn't be all that bad for a 9600GSO SLI setup -- some non-reference designs of 8800 GT / GS cards have non-standard coolers that  work well cooling a single card, but are too large for proper air flow in a dual card setup. But that isn't the case here -- having two Palit 9600 GSO cards right beside together wouldn't be all the bad, in terms of airflow. One the con side of things, this orange plastic shroud is destined to become the ultimate Alacatraz for dust in your computer case, making the occasional cleaning session a chore.

Let's compare the designs of the Palit 9600GSO Sonic with Palit 9600GT Sonic a bit more, shall we?  One of the best features of the 9600GT Sonic was its unsurpassed assortment of output options: besides the usual dual DVI and TV out, the older Sonic came with a DisplayPort, a HDMI port, and a SPDIF audio port. That collection of ports really seperated the Palit 9600GT Sonic from the rest of the back -- but unfortunately, the 9600GSO Sonic only has the standard dual DVI and TV out.

One feature the 9600GSO Sonic has that the 9600GT Sonic does not is a metal plate on the back of the card. This orange-painted metal plate helps cool the 768MB's of GDDR3 memory. While in operation, this plate gets quite hot -- for the overclocking inclined, putting a fan right on the backplate, or using some other direct cooling methods, could help get the Palit 9600GSO out-of-the-box overclock up to new heights.

Specifications

That out-of-the-box overclock just mentioned is is fairly healthy, as such overlcocks go. The standard 9600GSO runs ats 550 /  1375 / 1600 (core / shader clock / memory), and, as you can see from the chart below,  the 9600 GSO Sonic has an appreciable gain in all three of these areas. It'll be interesting to see in the benchmarks how the GSO compares to the GT: while the GT's clocks are faster, the GSO has more stream processors.

The Palit 9600GSO has the following notable features:

• PCI Express 2.0 Support
• Full Microsoft® DirectX® 10 Shader Model 4.0 support
• 16x full-screen anti-aliasing
• True 128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting
• NVIDIA® Quantum Effects™ physics processing technology
• Two dual-link DVI outputs support two 2560x1600 resolution displays
• NVIDIA® PureVideo™ HD technology
• OpenGL® 2.1 support
• NVIDIA® Lumenex™ Engine
• NVIDIA® nView® Multi-Display Technology
• Discrete, Programmable Video Processor
• Hardware Decode Acceleration
• Spatial-Temporal De-Interlacing
• Inverse Telecine (3:2 & 2:2 Pulldown Correction)
• Video Color Correction
• Integrated SD and HD TV Output
• Noise Reduction
• Edge Enhancement
• HDMI functionality through DVI-HDMI dongle and SPDIF cable