The Card

The front of the card doesn’t give us a whole lot to look at. Galaxy have opted to use their own design cooler which manages not only to take up the whole front of the card but also requiring two PCI slots due to its extra thickness.



The whole card carries with it the presence of just about any higher end graphics card that we’ve seen from NVIDIA lately.



Moving to the side of the card we have a single PCI Express power connector.



Continuing around the card we get to the top where we see a single SLI connector. This should mean that the card doesn’t support the new Tri-SLI technology available on the new 780i NVIDIA based motherboards. The feature tends to only be seen with their top-end cards.



The I/O side of things is also very standard; while we have seen 9600GTs with Display Port, HDMI and more, this model from Galaxy carries with it a pair of Dual Link DVI connectors and a TV-Out port.

There isn’t really too much to the card. Length wise it comes in at the same size as an 8800GT. The reference design card seems to use a single slot cooler, but the option to go dual slot isn’t really a big deal as we’ve become more and more accustom to seeing graphics cards go down this route.


Specifications

While the new 8800GT and GTS cards use the fairly recent G92 based core, the new 9600GT offers an even more updated core code named G94. The card comes with 512MB of GDDR3 running on a 256-bit bus which is also seen on the 8800GT. The standard 9600GT will carry with it a Core/Shader/Memory setup of 650MHz/1650MHz/1800MHz DDR. This overclocked variant from Galaxy carries with it 675MHz/1625MHz/2000MHz DDR. Once we get a stock clocked 9600GT in our lab we’ll do some comparison runs to see what this overclock eventuates to in the real world.



Information is still kind of vague at the moment as a lot of the technical information hasn’t been released. Fortunately GPU-Z shows us a whole lot. We can see the chip is based on 65nm technology, has four ROPs and 64 Unified shaders. We can also see fill rate numbers along with the clocks.