XFX GeForce 9600GT XXX Edition Video Card Review

XFX GeForce 9600GT XXX Edition

The G94 GPU core that powers the 9600GT has quite the heritage. It is in effect a derivative of the grandfather G80 core that powered the venerable 8800GTX. Nvidia’s 9600GT has given the average consumer a video card option that lets them enter the high definition gaming era with only a $125 investment. This particular model of the 9600GT comes from XFX with a warrantied overclock and therefore fetches a slightly higher price at $160. With 505 million transistors, the 9600GT is a rather tiny performance GPU, for comparison’s sake the G92-200 from the 8800GT has a whopping 754 million transistors.

Today I’ve got the XFX XXX Alpha Dog Edition 9600GT with model number PV-T94P-YHS4 to review. I only mention this model number as XFX has 14 9600GT models available and of those 4 are XFX XXX Alpha Dog Edition cards. Each XXX Alpha Dog Edition only varies in the game bundled with the card so if you plan on purchasing more than one card, grab different models so you don’t double up on the bundled games.

I’ll be comparing this XFX XXX Alpha Dog Edition 9600GT to a factory overclocked Gigabyte 8800GT. To make it easier to understand precisely what we are comparing here today, below I’ve created a table that includes all the vital statistics on both cards along with the clockspeeds that both cards were set to operate at when launched. Both the Gigabyte 8800GT and the XFX 9600GT XXX Alpha Dog Edition have factory overclocks so this isn’t precisely an apples to apples comparison however these overclocks are guaranteed from the manufacturer and to the user they are invisible performance boosts.

Card	Core	Shader	Memory	SPU	ROP	TMU	Transistors
Default 9600GT	650MHz	1625MHz	1800MHz	64	16	32	505 Million
XFX 9600GT XXX	740MHz	1850MHz	2000MHz	64	16	32	505 Million
Default 8800GT	600MHz	1500MHz	1800MHz	112	16	56	754 Million
Gigabyte 8800GT	700MHz	1705MHz	1840MHz	112	16	56	754 Million