With the package out of the way and moving onto the card itself; pulling it out of the box showed us instantly that it pretty much resembles a 9600 GT. Being the Sonic version, the card carries with it the larger dual slot cooler that goes straight over the top of the core. We also have a plate that covers the memory.
The reference cooler is a single slot one like as seen before that completely covers the card. It’s worth noting, as if you’re into the 9600 GSO but don’t want a dual slot card then you can get a reference model one.
Like the 9600 GT, we have a single 6-pin PCI Express connector towards the back of the card. The top of the card also has a single SLI connector, much like the 8800 GS and the 9600 GT.
The I/O department doesn’t hold any surprises like the Sonic 9600GT did; we only find our two Dual Link DVI connectors and standard TV-Out port.
Looking at the card, there really isn’t anything out of the ordinary, Palit has just done their typical upgrade to the card to bring it into the Sonic series.
Specifications
The default clock speeds on the 9600 GSO are exactly the same as the 8800 GS; the core comes in at 550MHz, shader clock 1375MHz and 384MB or 768MB of GDDR3 at 1600MHz DDR. The Sonic version from Palit comes with a 600MHz core and a 1900MHz DDR memory speed.
Compared to the 9600GT that comes with a 650MHz core and 1800MHz DDR memory clock, there really isn’t much difference. The main difference between the two cards is that the GSO has a 192-bit memory interface verses the 256-bit one on the GT. The other major difference is the fact that you have 96 stream processors on the GSO while the GT only has 64.
All in all, the cards are quite similar and how they perform against each other will be interesting.
