Gigabyte GV-NX96T512H-B

Verdict:

[+} Vanilla

Offers decent performance for the money

[-] Plain

Needs to be overclocked; fan struggles to keep the GPU cool

As the GeForce 9600 GT cards we've previously reviewed both arrived pre-overclocked, we wanted to see how cheap a stock-speed card is, and how far we could overclock it ourselves. While you'd expect a pretty spartan box when going vanilla, the design on Gigabyte's box tries to convey premium rather than bargain.

Look closely at the box, however, and you'll see the tell-tale signs. The pretty lady (possibly a cyber-elf) looks a little bored, as though she's wondering which nutrient tablets she'll ingest for dinner, or whether or not 'Corrie' will be on the Holo-telly later.

There's also no free game. However, there are two DVI-to-D-SUB converters, a break-out box for S-Video and component video out, and a Molex to PCI-E power converter.

CLOCK SPEEDS

Plugging in the card confirms that it abides by Nvidia's suggested clock speeds. The core of the GPU runs at 650MHz, the 64 stream processors at 1.625GHz, and the 512MB of GDDR3 RAM at 900MHz (1.8GHz effective).

With the 256-bit memory interface, this gives the card a hefty 57.6GB/sec of bandwidth, the same as that of a £140 512MB GeForce 8800 GT.

COOLER

The card's cooler is a single-slot design and, although the fan looks small, when powered up, the card is extremely quiet even after hours of gaming. The reason for this soon became clear, however - the fan refuses to spin faster no matter what happens. As a result, the temperature of the GPU rockets when it's asked to work hard.

We hope that Nvidia will rectify this in a future driver release; while low noise levels from a fan are desirable, we'd prefer it to perform its main function of keeping the hardware cool. After all, you'll be wearing a headset, or have your speakers on when gaming anyway, so a slightly noisier fan won't disturb you too much.

PERFORMANCE

Thankfully, the card proved to be perfectly stable at stock speeds, and we saw roughly the level of performance that we've come to expect from a £120 graphics card. Need for Speed: Pro Street never showed a jitter even at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA and maximum AF.

The minimum of 28fps is lower than the 31fps minimum of the pre-overclocked XpertVision GeForce 9600GT Sonic, which now costs £12.72 less than the Gigabyte. It's also worth noting that the XpertVision uses its dual-slot height to accommodate HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, as well as two DVI connections, while the Gigabyte has only two DVI outputs and a video output.

The performance in Call of Duty 4 was similar, with the Gigabyte scoring 28fps minimum at 1,680 x 1,050 compared to the 29fps minimum of the XpertVision. The factory overclock of the XpertVision again makes it a fraction faster.

In Crysis, the Gigabyte fell short of delivering a playable minimum at our lowest test resolution of 1,024 x 768, while the XpertVision scraped by with a 25fps minimum.

OVERCLOCKING

The ForceWare 174.16 driver wouldn't play nicely with the latest version of nTune, so for overclocking, we used Gainward's ExperTool 6.1, which should work with all GeForce 9600 GT cards. We raised the core of the GPU by 50MHz to 700MHz, and increased the memory from 900MHz to 1GHz (2GHz effective). Unlike many other overclocking tools, ExperTool 6.1 can also alter the stream processors' speed, so we ramped them up from 1.625GHz to 1.8GHz.

The new core and memory speeds matched those of the XpertVision card, but our overclocked stream processors were 50MHz faster. With this big overclock, overheating became an issue; if we stopped the fan with our fingers, the hot-running card would crash our test system within seconds. As a result, we had to add an extra case fan for stability's sake.

Our big overclock couldn't make Call of Duty playable at 1,920 x 1,200, but the card was 3-4fps quicker than it was at stock speeds. For example, Crysis was playable at 1,024 x 768, with a minimum of 27fps and an average of 35fps.

CONCLUSION

As the Gigabyte GeForce 9600 GT costs £8 more than the pre-overclocked XpertVision GeForce 9600GT Sonic, and lacks HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, it struggles to justify its price. We were able to apply a slightly greater overclock to this card than XpertVision applies to its Sonic card, but there's still no guarantee that every Gigabyte card will overclock as far as our card.

We're also worried that the stock cooler is more concerned about being quiet than actually keeping its GPU cool. The XpertVision has more outputs, a better cooler, an overclock that's covered by warranty and is cheap; it's the best £100-120 card at the moment.

You can buy the Gigabyte GV-NX96T512H-B from Overclockers UK for £93.99 inc VAT now (price correct at time of review)

For more information on the GV-NX96T512H-B, visita Gigabyte's website

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