GeForce 9600 GT Triplet Review
July 8, 2008
NVIDIA’s success in 2005-2006, when it was launching products step by step ending up with GeForce 8800, turned the company’s head and brought chaos. We have an impression that marketing specialists of this company forgot about primary needs, permanently celebrating victories over the competitor. I was told once that some companies build their entire business on the slogan to be better than their competitors. That is, not to develop innovations or think about users, but just to be better than the competitor. NVIDIA is a perfect example of this modus operandi.
Why think about users? The company rolled out GeForce 8800 GTS 320/640 MB with 96 processors and a 320-bit bus. Then the same product name was used for a card with 512 MB of memory, a 256-bit bus, and 128 processors. They don’t care if users are confused - in fact, a 640 MB card is slower than a 512MB card, based on a new core. Both cards are called 8800 GTS. A little higher frequency, and we get 9800 GTX. And no one took pains to explain to users why the first number was incremented and the suffix was changed. The former should indicate a change of generations. It took a real revolution to change 7800 to 8800. While 8800 and 9800 differ by mere 25 MHz.
That’s not all. Now the 8800 GS are be renamed into 9600 GSO, because the ‘8′ digit is already an eyesore, and there are so many G92 rejects that they must be utilized. Again no one has explained to users that the 9600 GT has 64 processors and a 256-bit bus, while the 9600 GSO has 96 processors and a 192-bit bus. Besides, they are based on different cores.
The lesson taught by the 8800 GTS 640 and 8800 GTS 512 based on different cores was wasted. Why think about users? What’s important is that AMD with its 3870 is left far behind, and only the 3870 X2 is still kicking.
To say nothing about the mess with the 8800 GT and 9800 GT. Plus the GT200 with a consequent rollout of cut-down products based on its rejects. That’s a real mess.
Some of you may think that I’m exaggerating. However, many retailers share this opinion. Even NVIDIA already realizes what they have done.
Moreover, this mess is undeservingly corrupting user impression of some products and their value. For example, GeForce 9600 GT is a very good product for its price, performance and features. The problem is with lots of older products and the notorious 9600 GSO. But it still makes sense to examine new products based on 9600 GT.
Today we are going to take a look at at products made by Gainward and Forsa. The former is a well-known manufacturer, while the latter is a startup. I cannot say that it’s super, but it manufactures good products for minimal prices possible. There are both pros and cons. Today we are going to examine one card from Forse that is already replacing the regular reference 9600 GT.
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