Digital Home Thoughts: The Next Generation GPU: Nvidia's GeForce 9600 GT

"There's no doubt about it, Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GT has delivered the best bang for buck on the market since its launch, and it rightfully earned the title of bit-tech's best graphics card of 2007. It brings performance that gets close to long-time flagship—the GeForce 8800 GTX—to a price point that's somewhere between £150 and £190, depending on partner configuration. But for many gamers, that's just too much to spend on a graphics card and nobody wanted to buy the frankly disappointing GeForce 8600 GTS. Nvidia went some way to filling the gaping hole in its line-up with the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB and the GeForce 8800 GS 384MB, but neither were really better choices than the ATI Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 graphics cards that collectively helped to turn things around for AMD at the back end of last year."

NVIDIA keeps cranking away, giving us faster and faster GPUs - but what's a bit curious about this new series of cards (based on the G94 GPU) is that the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB card benchmarks faster in almost every case. The pricing of the GeForce 8800 GT is just a bit above the 9600 GT, so it makes you wonder why anyone would opt for a 9600 GT. Not being a hard-core gamer, I haven't really kept up to speed with the video card market. For me, reasonable performance and pure silence is always my goal - to that end, all of my video cards are passively cooled. Most of my systems are using 7600-based cards, passively cooled, and my main system that I use for playing games (City of Heroes, Neverwinter Nights 2, etc.) is using a GeForce 7950 GT that gives me great frame-rates at 1920 x 1200 resolution yet is still completely silent. I'll pay attention to the 9000 series NVIDIA products when someone releases a passively cooled card.