Testing

Installation

Installation for this GPU was no problem at all; the cooler and screws caused no mounting issues whatsoever. The only thing you may want to watch out for is that this card has a double slot cooler, so those with packed PCI brackets need to make sure they have space for it.

Methodology

For testing GPUs they are put through several synthetic and gaming benchmarks and then repeat the tests after overclocking the card to it's max to see the effects of overclocking.

The benchmarks that were run were as follows:

• 3Dmark06
• Unreal Tournament 3
• Lost Planet
• Crysis

The PC used for testing this GPU was our P35 based C2D setup:

All tests were run 3 times and the average of the results taken from each.

For all tests, the results will be compared to those of our previously reviewed MSI 8800GT, and Vvikoo's own, 8800GT 1GB.

Overclocking

Overclocking the 9600GT wasn't too difficult, but the process had it's problems. Rivatuner and ATI tool weren't fans of this card, so I had to use Ntune's performance settings to up the frequencies. This means there's no shader clock, clockin' I'm afraid.

Making sure I had the fan spinning at full capacity, I started to move the card from it's factory overclock of 700/1000 and managed to go all the way to 900/1100. Unfortunately, this was horrendously unstable and would crash 3Dmark06 within seconds. A more realistic clock was achieved at 850MHZ on the core and 1050 on the memory.

The memory OC seems a little poor, even though they were factory overclocked 100MHZ over stock. Perhaps if Vvikoo had added RAM sinks - even the simple ones from their 8600GT - would have allowed a few more MHZ.