G94: Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT 512MB

Zotac GeForce 9600 GT 512MB AMP! Edition

Manufacturer: Zotac
UK Price (as reviewed): £125.61 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): TBC

Core Clock: 725MHz
Shader Clock: 1,750MHz
Memory Clock: 2,000MHz
Warranty: Two years (parts and labour) in Europe

Zotac has been on the ball in the last few months and was once again the first Nvidia board partner to get hardware into our hands before the launch. The company sent over its factory-overclocked AMP! Edition, which comes with an impressive overclock to 725MHz core, 1,725MHz shader and 2,000MHz (effective) on the memory – these represent respective clock speed increases over the reference design of 11.5 percent, 7.7 percent and 11.1 percent.

Being an early sample, there's very little that's different between this card and the other cards we were sent – apart from the clock speed, the only real difference is the sticker artwork on the top. As a result, we'll use Zotac's card for our reference card examination.


Like the GeForce 8800 GT, the GeForce 9600 GT is a single-slot graphics card that measures 228mm in length. The heatsink design is similar to the improved GeForce 8800 GT design and features three flattened heatpipes that are connected to a copper baseplate that comes into direct contact with the GPU.

Heat is then transferred to the array of fins via the heatpipes and then air is blown across these by the 70mm radial fan – this remained quiet throughout our testing, even during prolonged periods of heavy gaming. Obviously, being a single slot cooling solution, one concern you might have is that there is nowhere for the heat to be exhausted from the system, which means that the hot air pushed out from the card is just moved back into the case – this shouldn't be an issue as long as you've got adequate case cooling, though.


While the PCB is the same length as the GeForce 8800 GT's and GeForce 8800 GTS 512's, the design itself is actually quite a bit different. There are fewer surface mount components on the front of the card for starters, and the PWM circuitry looks decidedly less substantial – after all, the reference board's 95W maximum power draw is 10W less than the GeForce 8800 GT's 105W rating, but that isn't enough for Nvidia to be able to remove the 6-pin PCI-Express supplementary power connector.

The GPU has been rotated by 45 degrees in its packaging, but unlike what was the case with R600, this isn't because the chip itself struggles to fit on its substrate packaging. The area surrounding the GPU though is pretty typical of Nvidia graphics cards – the eight DRAM chips are arranged in pairs in an incomplete horseshoe. As for the DRAMs themselves, they're 64MB Samsung K4J52324QE-BJ1A GDDR3 memory chips, making a total of 512MB of on-board memory that's rated to 2,000MHz (effective).