NVIDIA's Hot New Card The GeForce 9600 GT

Official reviews of NVIDIA’s newest mid-range graphics card, the 9600 GT are out and the card looks like a hit. The GeForce 9600 GT is the first release of NVIDIA's GeForce 9 series which will included a 9500 Series, 9600 series and 9800 series. Estimated pricing is $180-$210, competitively pricing the card with the Radeon HD 3850 and Nvidia's own 8600gts.

Official Specifications of the 9600 GT:

64 Stream Processors. 20.8 billion texels/s fillrate. 650 MHz core clock, with a 1625 MHz unified shader clock. 900 MHz memory, with a 256-bit memory interface. 256 MiB, 512 MB or 1 GB of DDR2 or GDDR3 memory[5]. 57.6 GB/s memory bandwidth. DirectX 10, Shader Model 4.0, OpenGL 2.1, and PCI-Express 2.0[6]. Is compatible with HDCP, but the implementation will depend on the manufacturer. Supports the Quantum Effects physics processing engine. Almost double the performance of the current mid-range card, the GeForce 8600. Estimated cost between $180-$210.

Current reviews from Tom's Hardware , PC Perspective and ARS Technica show the new card to be an HD 3850 and 8600 GTS killer. The benchmarks in the reviews place it at the "sweet spot" for pricing and performance.

Pricing Updated 12/16/08

• ASUS GeForce 9600 GT EN9600GT/HTDI/512M Video Card
  $94.99 After $20.00 MIR Exp 12/31
• Leadtek GeForce 9600 GT PX9600GT Extreme Video Card
  $94.99 After $15.00 MIR Exp 1/05/09
• GIGABYTE GeForce 9600 GT GV-NX96T512H Video Card
  $109.99 After $10.00 MIR Exp 12/31

Given the cards recent release the prices are fairly in line with estimates, however I expect to see a few deals coming down the line. ATI/AMD has already been lowering prices on both the HD 3850 and the 3870. So we could see prices for this card fall slightly rather soon.