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Power Usage

To measure power usage, we used a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter. Note that the above numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the 'idle' readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running; for the 'load' situation, we ran a demanding part of 3DMark06.

It looks like the 9600GT is definitely not a power hog, and uses even less power the 55nm HD 3870, which is impressive. Idling around the 139 Watt level is quite good -- and at load, it saps about as much juice as a 8800GT, which isn't that bad either.

On the topic of power, one thing that was not mentioned earlier is a unique quality that both the Palit 9600GT and Palit 9600GT Sonic share. Whereas the standard 9600GT has a 2 phase power distribution system, the Palit cards have a 3 phase power distribution system. What does this mean exactly? Well, basically it means that voltage is better regulated to give a more stable power supply to your card. As DC current is in a constant state of fluctuation, you can see 3 phase power adding another steadying 'step' to these oscillation voltages, which softens the peaks and valleys of your power distribution. According to Palit, by having 3 phase power, you're going to extend the life of circuitry, as well as lower the operating temperature of your 9600GT.     

SLI

SLI has come a long way this year. NVIDIA has been improving SLI to a new level of efficiency, as well as introducing 3-Way SLI, for the top-end cards, such as the 8800 Ultra. 

For our benchmarking games that we tested, half of them benefited significantly by SLI. For the other three games, the benefits were negligible -- but this will most likely change with future driver releases. For the SLI scaling that was working, performance gains often ranged between a 40% to 50% increase in frame rates when the second card was activated. This isn't too bad, especially at this early point. These performance gains are similar than can be had with a 8800 GT SLI setup -- which is not a surprise, I suppose, considering the shared DNA between these two cards. 

The 9600GT makes for an attractive SLI solution, due to the relative low price of a pair of cards. However, in almost any case, you are still better off going with a single card, such as a 8800 GTS 512MB, than picking up a pair of 9600GT's off of the get-go. The strength of SLI still lies in having that upgrade path open to you in the future. Especially as the price of video cards continually fall.  

Overclocking

The cooling solution on the Palit 9600GT Sonic looked fairly effective, so overclocking prospects looked good. Although the Palit 9600GT Sonic edition is a factory-overclocked model, with the core clock boost of 50 MHz, a memory clock increase of 200 MHz, and a hearty shader clock push of 125 MHz, we were hoping that we'd people push it to even further heights. 

The Palit 9600GT Sonic comes with its own utility called 'VDOTool', that is similar in design to Expertool packaged with Gainward cards. It is a nice program -- little resource overhead, but with extensive functionality. As always, we set the fan manually to run at 100%, and started increasing our clock speeds by 10 MHz increments until we hit walls.

Although the card could run for some time at an impressive 784 / 2194 / 1991 (core / memory / shader clock) setting, it was not stable at this speed. It wasn't until we went down to 760 / 2168 / 1912 that the card was able to complete a hour of intensive GPU activity without crashing.

With the 9600GT Sonic already being overclocked, these are pretty solid overclocking gains. With the default reference 9600GT's clocks being 650 / 1800 / 1625, running our Palit 9600GT Sonic at 760 / 2168 / 1912 rock steady was enough to put a big grin on our faces. Another thing to be happy about was that the 9600GT Sonic's fan is a fairly quiet -- even running at 100% power it wasn't incredibly loud.