G94: Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT 512MB

Conclusions

Nvidia's GeForce 9600 GT has left me in two minds – on the one front, it's a great piece of hardware that has a lot of performance potential, but on the other hand, the card is heavily overpriced at most of the top UK online retailers. Most retailers are expecting customers to pay in excess of £130 for a standard-clocked card and some are expecting us to pay more like £140!

That's frankly just too much when there are GeForce 8800 GT 512MB cards with modest overclocks priced at just over £150 including the tax man's cut. Anyone with any sense would take a night off the beer, work a bit of overtime, or just part with an extra £10 to pick up a card with much more potential. After all, with the PureVideo HD update rolled out across all G9x-based products, there's nothing that the GeForce 9600 GT can do that the GeForce 8800 GT can't.

There's also the fact that AMD dropped its prices last night in anticipation of this launch. The PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme PCS 512MB that we looked at earlier in the week is now available for just over £100 (inc. VAT), while the cheapest Radeon HD 3870 is also a PowerColor card – that comes in at £125.73, including VAT of course.

In essence then, at the prices the retailers are expecting you to pay at the moment, the GeForce 9600 GT is competing more with the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB than it is with AMD's products. And the problem there is that it's not as fast as the GeForce 8800 GT – in fact, it's not really much faster than the Radeon HD 3870, either.

But... there's a saving grace for the GeForce 9600 GT.

Both Dabs and Micro Direct seem to be the only two retailers in the UK that seem to have got their pricing in line with where it should be! Dabs is listing a standard-clocked Gigabyte GeForce 9600 GT 512MB in stock for £120.48 (inc. VAT) and it's also listing XFX and MSI GeForce 9600 GTs at around the £115 mark – these are the kinds of prices we were expecting and they fit in line with where AMD's competing products are now priced.

Zotac's GeForce 9600 GT AMP! Edition surprised us a bit, because with an expected street price of around £140 (inc. VAT), it looked like it was going to be too close to the appreciably faster pre-overclocked GeForce 8800 GT 512MB cards – remember that we've only compared it to a standard card here. However, at the last minute, Micro Direct hit the jackpot with the £125.61 it's asking for Zotac's factory overclocked card. In fact, that makes the standard GeForce 9600 GT look overpriced when initially I felt Zotac's card was going to be too close to the GeForce 8800 GT's price.

With the introduction of the GeForce 9600 GT, there are now "good buys" at around £120, £150 and £190 for the 9600 GT, 8800 GT 512MB and the 8800 GTS 512MB. As soon as you factor in the cost of qualifying an overclock for large volumes of products—something that adds to the retail price—and then maybe fit an aftermarket cooler – bam, you're competing with a different product all together... unless your name is Zotac.

I had written a massive rant on this page originally, but what has saved Nvidia is the prices that both Dabs and Micro Direct have hit with this product. This shows that pricing is absolutely paramount in this market segment and it can turn what is actually quite a good card into one that represents exceedingly poor value for money.

Final Thoughts...

Nvidia's GeForce 9600 GT 512MB is a great performer, as long as it hits the right price point. If it doesn't, there's even more of a reason to buy the GeForce 8800 GT than there ever was before – it just goes to show how great that product really was for gamers. Thankfully, there are a few partners and retailers out there willing to charge what the card should ship at instead of what they'd like it to be in order to cash in on the sales rush at launch.

Simply put, don't pay any more than £130 for a GeForce 9600 GT – regardless of whether it's a standard card or one with a factory overclock.

Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT 512MB

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Zotac GeForce 9600 GT 512MB AMP! Edition

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What do these scores mean?


Update 7:00AM GMT 22/2/08:
Micro Direct has increased its price for the Zotac GeForce 9600 GT 512MB AMP! Edition back up to £137.01 (inc. VAT) - at that price, you may as well get a GeForce 8800 GT for £13 more. If the Zotac comes back down to below £130, it is worth consideration - our recommendation is based on that.