If you are thinking on buying a new mid-range or budget graphics card with a good value for performance you should have a look at the Nvidia cards. The 9600GT and the 8800GT are the best performers with real value.

The 9600GT is a newer card but just because belong to the GeForce 9 series doesn’t mean that is better than the 8800GT. Both cards are great for gaming and if you are building a gaming PC with a budget you can’t go wrong with any of these cards but there is some specification differences between them.

The 8800GT has 112 stream processors and the 9600GT has only 64 and that is almost half of the 8800GT. Though the 9600GT is almost 10% faster on the core clock 650MHz vs 600MHz and shader clock 1625Mhz vs 1500Mhz with the same memory clock 900MHz, memory amount of 512MB, memory interface of 256-bit, memory bandwidth 57.6 and the texture fill rate is only 20.8 vs 33.6 of the 8800GT.  

As you can see on the texture fill rate the bigger quantity of stream processors on the 8800GT makes a big difference. This difference on stream processors can be seen on some games running at high video settings and high resolutions. Like playing over the 1280×1024 the 8800GT will outperform the 9600GT though is a bit faster on the shader and core clocks. Have a look at the tests on the 9600GT HERE

The 9600GT is a great card if you are not playing games at resolutions over  1280×1024, at this resolution is a great card able to run any game smoothly and giving you good frame per seconds. The price difference between them is very small around R2200 for the 9600GT and R2500 for the 8800GT so for just R300 more you can get those extra frame per second at higher resolutions. So I can say that the 8800GT is the best value for performance graphic card out there right now but not by too much the 9600GT is very good as well.

Check the following videos to make a better decision: 9600GT

And the 8800GT

You can buy the 9600GT right HERE

You can buy the 8800GT right HERE

XFX has overcloaked the 9800 GTX even more for extreme gaming performance called "XFX 9800 GTX Black Edition". Previously we reviewd the standard 9800GTX and the basic of the cards are just the same, here we are just going to talk about improvements on speed and performance between them. If you did’nt read that review just check it HERE

The XFX GeForce9800GTX Black Edition card has a clock speed of 760MHz, which is a 85MHz overclock of the standard 9800GTX clock speed of 675MHz, a 20MHz overclock of the XT Edition and a 40MHz overclock of the XXX Edition. The Shader clock of 1900MHz compares quite favorably with the Shader Clock of 1698MHz of the standard 9800GTX, 1850MHz of the XXX and 1800MHz of the XT Edition from XFX.

Comparison

Check the specification differences between the standard 9800GTX and the Black Edition Click Here

Gaming Test

Have a look at how this cards performs on games Click Here

Although not the fastest card out there in the VGA world the XFX Black Edition is one serious card for the gaming crowd as it does perform above the standard variety of 9800GTX cards the XFX Black Edition GeForce 9800GTX, it comes with Call of Duty 4 or Assasin’s Creed, which are 2 of the hottest PC gaming titles available at this moment. Check the following video with more information and see how good is this Black Edition:

You can get the XFX 9800 GTX Black Edition at a good price right HERE

Gamer’s the XFX Geforce 9800GTX 512mb has arrived to boost your gaming, so let’s find out what can do. The GTX moniker has always stood for high-end performance from the chip. The 7800GTX was the fastest 7XXX series card till the 7900GTX, the 8800GTX was the fastest 8xxx card until the Ultra and it generally meant that the card was the fastest single card of that generation.

Now the 9800GTX was designed to replace the GeForce 8800 GTX, the new 9800 GTX is not quite as mighty as once suspected. In fact if you look at the specifications carefully, the GeForce 9800 GTX appears to be nothing more than a tweaked version of the already existing GeForce 8800 GTS 512 graphics card. This is made disappointing due to the fact that the 8800 GTS 512 is very similar to the 8800 GTX in terms of performance.

The XFX 9800GTX is a very large card, not as monstrous as the 9800GX2 or HD3870X2, but almost as big and it’ll hang off the end of your motherboard, and take up every millimeter of it’s double-slot width. Compared to a 8800 GTX, both PCBs are of the same length, but the cooler on the 9800GTX stretches even further along than its predecessors. In regards to the cooler, the one on the XFX 9800 GTX is from the standard, reference design XFX have not changed it in anyway.

Specs:

Compare it with previous models:

Specials Features:

Hybrid SLI
PureVideo HD
Dynamic Contrast Enhancement
Dynamic Color Enhancement
Dual-Stream Decode

Gaming Test:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (3.00GHz) LGA775

2 X 2GB OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400

ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (Intel X38)

Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit)

Nvidia Forceware 174.53 driver

This GeForce 9800 GTX delivers very good performance, excellent overclocking capabilities, is extremely quiet, SLI™ & Tri-SLI certified, extremely cool even when overclocking and a low power consumption. If you are looking for a flagship video card this one has all the gaming power that you need.

]]> http://digitalreviews.co.za/xfx-geforce-9800gtx-512mb/feed/ 1