1 - Introduction

GeForce 9600 GSO 384 MB
Info: pointofview-online.comPrice: 89 EUR - 99 USD

The budget market is mean and fierce, and apparently a good spot for NVIDIA to be in because believe it or not, that lower and mid-range segment is really where the money is to be made in the graphics chipset industry. NVIDIA just released their GeForce 9600 GSO. Priced at less than 99 EUR and by doing so is offering a pretty dandy gaming experience at the sub 100 EUR price level. The product comes with that weird number again .. 384 MB of memory on an even more peculiar 192-bit wide memory bus. Does that ring a bell already ? Yes this definitely is a re-spun product based on the older G80 core. Rebadged, rebranded and stamped as a G92 placebo.

Now before you think otherwise, that info isn't intended to be negative, no Sir .. contrary, because I think we stumbled into the best value card sub 100 bucks costing product in a long time.

Hilbert, dude, bro, my man ... rebadged you said ? Correct Sir .. this card you have seen earlier last year as the GeForce 8800 GS. NVIDIA simply pulled a David Copperfield here: Shalakazim, shalazam .. and BAM. The GeForce series 8 card is now a GeForce series 9 product. Magic eh? NVIDIA now officially has got to have the most confusing product line ever.

Okay, so NVIDIA replaced the GeForce 8800 GS with the GeForce 9600 GSO. The 9600 GSO is still based on the same G92 core with 96 stream processors that the 8800 GS has, but NVIDIA gave card makers a bit more freedom in their designs in terms of own PCB design to and determine their own clocks. This 'old' card will still have 384 MB of GDDR3 memory over a weird 192-bit memory interface.

Cards like these will sell for less than 99 Euro, and considering the performance you get returned for that, you'll love it.

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GSO
• Bus Type: PCI Express
• Memory: 384MB GDDR3
• Core Clock: 550 MHz
• Memory Clock: 1600 MHz
• Shader Model: 4.0
• Connectors: 2 Dual-Link DVI-I, HDTV + TV Out
• HDCP Enabled: Yes

Above you can see the specifications of the product as tested today from the blokes over at Point of View.

We can expect several variants of cards with different types of cooling coming up to be branded as Overclocked Editions. Point of View's version is clocked at a 550 Mhz core clock, 1600 MHz memory clock (effective) and 1350 MHz shader domain clock frequency with is 96 shader cores.