| Palit GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Sonic NE/960TSX0202 |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Olin Coles | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Friday, 30 May 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Video Card Testing MethodologyWe're getting closer! Benchmark Reviews has high hopes that one day we will be so giant and world famous that every combination of the graphic card available will be on-hand for our product testing. I envy the review sites (all three of them) that have twenty other video cards tested in stand-alone, SLI, and CrossFireX arrays for each and every review. Readers can help us grow to that size as they spread the word, but for now we'll have to make due with what our budget can afford. In this article, Benchmark Reviews is going to test and compare the Palit NE/960TSX0202 GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Sonic graphics card against several other closely-ranked products from within the GeForce family. At the start of all tests, the previous display adapter driver is uninstalled and trace components are removed using Driver Cleaner Pro. We then restart the computer system to establish our display settings and define the monitor. Once the hardware is prepared, we begin our testing. The synthetic benchmark tests in 3DMark06 will utilize shader models 2.0 and 3.0. Every test is conducted at the following resolutions: 1600x1200 (20.1/21" Standard LCD's), 1280x1024 (19" Standard LCD), and 1024x768 (17" Standard LCD). Each test programs will run after a system restart, and the very first benchmark for every test will be ignored since it often only caches the test. This process proved extremely important in the World in Conflict and Supreme Commander benchmarks, as the first run served to cache maps allowing subsequent tests to perform much better than the first. Each test is completed five times, with the average results displayed in our article. Our website statistics indicate that the over 90% of our visitors use their PC for playing video games, and nearly 70% of you are using one of the screen resolutions mentioned above. Since all of the benchmarks we use for testing represent different game engine technology and graphic rendering processes, I feel that this battery of tests will provide a diverse range of results for you to gauge performance on your own computer system. Since most gamers and enthusiasts are still using Windows XP, it was decided that DirectX9 would be used for all tests until demand and software support improve for Windows Vista.
Test Products
The GeForce 9600 GT is the direct competition for the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB video card and 8800 GTS. Although NVIDIA released a new 256-bit version of the 8800 GTS, the older 320-bit version (offered with either 640 or 320MB) is still the most widely used video card by PC gamers from this series. Note that the default GeForce 8800 GTS core clock is 500MHz, while the FOXCONN GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB has been carefully overclocked to 600MHz. The standard GeForce 8800 GTS vRAM speed is 800MHz and has also been overclocked to 1030MHz while the shader clock remains at the standard 1200MHz.
Using the latest GPU-Z utility available for free from our affiliate at techPowerUp!, we verify manufacturer specifications with the actual internal specifications. In regard to the GeForce 9600 GT Sonic, it appears that all specifications match those stated by Palit for the NE/960TSX0202. Benchmark Applications
Test System
Benchmark Reviews will test the new Palit GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Sonic discrete graphics card (model NE/960TSX0202 ) against the most widely used NVIDIA products it competes against. Below is a chart with the most recent high-performance offerings from NVIDIA.
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