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Impressions
While the reference design 9600 GT looks a lot like a standard 8800 GT, the Palit GeForce 9600GT Sonic looks like like neither. The first thing you'll notice about the 9600GT Sonic is its rather startling, attention-grabbing orange plastic 'cage' that encloses the video card. While the reference design 9600GT has a single-slot design, the 9600GT Sonic is definitely a double-width card.
From what I can see, the plastic cage does little to direct the cooling air coming from the fan towards the surface of the PCB. Instead of directing hot air out of the rear of your card (and out of your case), air flows from the fan in all directions. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as the heatsink on this card appears quite capable of achieving the requisite cooling; it has numerous lengthy aluminum heat fins, attached to the GPU by a layer of copper. The cooling is further assisted by two copper heat pipes running through the fins.
Back to the orange cage for a moment though -- it does seem a little unnecessary due to its size. Depending on your motherboard, you may have to reposition your SATA connectors. Furthermore, the cage might make a perfect prison for dust bunnies, which are known to frequent computer cases.
Size-wise, the Palit GeForce 9600GT Sonic is large for a mid-range card. It has a length the 8800GT, coming in at just over 22 cm's.
On left: XFX 8800 GTS 512, Palit 9600GT Sonic, VisionTek HD3870 On right: XFX 8800 GTS 512, Palit 9600GT Sonic, XFX 8800 GT .
Specifications
| Palit 9600GT Sonic | 9600GT | 8800GT 512MB | 8800GT 256MB | HD 3870 | HD 3850 | |
| Stream Processors | 64 | 64 | 112 | 112 | 320 | 320 |
| Core Clock | 700 | 650 | 600 | 600 | 775 | 668 |
| Shader Clock | 1750 | 1625 | 1500 | 1500 | 775 | 668 |
| Memory Clock | 2000 | 1800 | 1800 | 1800 | 2250 | 1656 |
| Memory Interface | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit |
| Memory Type | 512 MB GDDR3 | 512MB GDDR3 | 512MB GDDR3 | 256MB GDDR3 | 512MB GDDR4 | 256MB GDDR3 |
| Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) | 64.0 | 57.6 | 57.6 | 57.6 | 72.0 | 52.9 |
| Texture Fillrate (billion/sec) | 22.4 | 20.8 | 33.6 | 33.6 | 12.4 | 10.6 |
| Fabrication Process | 65nm | 65nm | 65nm | 65nm | 55nm | 55nm |
The chart above lays out the vital numbers within the tight competition of the current mid-range cards. As you can see, our Palit 9600GT Sonic is a factory-overclocked card. Palit will be selling a non-overclocked 9600GT with a smaller heatsink, but for many, those beefy increases to the clock speeds -- and the superior cooler -- will be very tempting for the extra $30 or so.
The 9600GT is DirectX 10.0 compatible, has Shader Model 4.0 support, and is a PCI Express 2.0 card. And similar to most of the cards from the 'old' 8th generation cards, the 9600GT features NVIDIA's PureVideo HD decoder, which improves HD playback, and unloads the processing of HD content off of your CPU, and onto your GPU.
Take a look at all those ports! Palit did a nice job here: in addition to the standard 2 DVI ports, there is also a HDMI port, and a SPDIF port for audio. And new for the 9600GT, we now have a DisplayPort. as well. Get used to these DisplayPorts, as they are going to be come the new 'de facto' interface standard for digital displays. Designed by VESA, one DisplayPort is capable of higher performance than a dual link DVI interface, and can carry audio signals as well.
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But the 9600 GT's are shaping up to be pretty good deals. Although, with big price cut on HD 3870 cards, it's a tough call. Either way you can get a lot of game power for about 200 bucks though
- Christine
Actually we don't send them back -- we just add the reviewed cards to what I call the "Archive of Justice" (which is basically a tall shelf, filled with video cards.)
But unfortunately I can't check the memory out for you. I'm not at the office. Perhaps tomorrow however.
After looking for a decent mid range gpu i came across this card. With this card overclocked how much improvement would it be to the card used on teh review?
Well, the Palit 9600GT is an overclocked card as well, with 700 MHz core, 1000 MHz memory clock. The MSI card has a 700 MHz core, and a bit slower memory at 950 MHz.
Basically you are looking at pretty similar level of performance.
There are multiple Sonics. The revised Sonic has different (better) cooler, and 1GB of memory. The Sonic that I reviewed came out at launch and had 512MB.
I'm not sure (this is all going from memory) but I think they also removed the plastic shroud on the new Sonic.
The new Sonic also had the 1GB designation in its name. It was like 9600GT Sonic 1GB I believe, whereas this one was just the 9600GT Sonic.
GET THEM you wont regret it:)