Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Foxconn GeForce 9600GT

At last!!! I can play games (at least a few!) in their highest graphics detail. This was a good deal from Barclays; Rs. 14,200/=. After so many queries to Gayan and Thusitha (thanks guys!) I decided to settle for 9600 instead of 9800 since it gave me a reasonable performance for a good price.

Spec:
NVIDIA 9600GT/512MB/GDDR3/256bit/Dual DVI/HDTV-out

Vista performance score: 5.9
(They have provided drivers for 32bit and 64bit systems of XP and Vista)

Note. The card works on Ubuntu as well. When I enabled the desktop effects it automatically downloaded and installed the driver. So no problem there.


Foxconn GeForce 9600GT (OC)
(Note the "OC" sign, which means Over Clocked. This is supposed to give a performance boost but I don't know its long term effects)


Size
This was a big one. It's about half the size of my motherboard! Just like Gayan, I had to remove my hard disks before plugging in the card to make room. They sure need to make these things less bulkier!

Power Input
I'm not used to graphics cards much. I had to separately supply power through the provided convector and it needed 2 power sockets. So a really power hungry device. If you have a server power unit like Thusitha the power unit has a separate socket for these kinds of graphics cards.

Display Outputs
The card only had 2 digital outs and one TV-out. They have provided 2 DVI-to-Analog converters. So I had to plug the monitor through that converter.

Game play
So far, I haven't been able to put my hands on latest games. But I tried NFS Carbon and Half Life 2-Episode One. Those could be run at full steam all settings maxed out very smoothly. A resolution of 1600X1200 and Anti Aliasing 4X seems nothing for the card on these games.

For the record, I thought of skipping NFS ProStreet and go for NFS Undercover. ProStreet seems a bit boring for me.

Here are 2 screenshots from Carbon and HL2-Ep01.


Update
Screenshots of GPU-Z. Core clock is 600MHz (can be over clocked up to 1200MHz). Memory Clock is 1000Mhz (can be over clocked up to 1200MHz). Foxconn has provided a small tool for over clocking but it cannot control GPU fan speed.


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11 comments:

Thusitha Hettige said...

yep! This is pretty reasonable price for a VGA like 9600. Actually I was trying to buy this but at that time it was out of stock. So went for the big one.:). After installing there was a problem in core temp in my one but thanks to Gayan and EVGA Precision problem is fixed on Vista, though it's still on Ubuntu.

Ravin said...

Yeah. Foxconn also provides a tool to change and monitor GPU specs. You can increase GPU and Memory clock speeds. But I'm afraid to touch those without adult supervision!!!

GayanNR said...

machan.. can u post a screen shot of GPU-Z.. so we can see for ourselves what r the actual clocks of your card..

And thusii.. this might come in handy.. don't know whether it will work or not...
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/236343-50-equivalent-speedfan-linux

Ravin said...

I added screenshots. The card came with a core clock of 700Mhz. I lowered it to 600MHz since thusi was also running with 600MHz. I'll play Crysis and decide which speed to keep!

GayanNR said...

Oh! machan.. Don't underclock it.. Thusi's GPU is different which the factory clock is 600MHZ.. (9800GT).. But the 9600GT is factory clocked 650MHz on core (2 different cores at different speeds..but the latter is slowerr due to crippled down shader processor count.. )..besides the card is factory Overclocked so u don't have to worry about the extra 50MHz overclock.. the card is made for it... and machan u can't overclock it to 1200MHZ though it shows that clock speed.. It is just a generic clock speed slider..

Thusitha Hettige said...

Ohh! I just now saw this. Thanks Gayan I'll try those.

Ravin said...

I 'm playing Crysis Warhead now. It's pretty good.

For fun I tried over clocking to 800MHz. Then as soon the game starts it goes black and Vista gives the error "Display driver stopped working and restarted". When I set it to the factory default then it's OK.

Anyway Crysis is a fantastic game.

GayanNR said...

Machan when u overclocking a VGA dont jump from like 100MHz... :-)
say by 10MHz by 10MHz, it would be fine,, Heshan (P-Heshan) busted his 7600GS by upping the Core speed to 800 from the default clock at once.. so be careful... he he

Prabath Ariyarathna said...

hi ravin
I have GeForce 9600GT card in my laptop.but there are some problem in ubuntu because no VGA drivers which can given full performance.There are some recommended drivers but not given full performance.I think Geforce are not concern about Linux platform.

Ravin said...

@prabath
There might be a slight difference in your laptop coz Ubuntu runs well on my desktop. As I remember, I installed the driver using "restricted drivers". No difficulty came up.

Compiz runs really well with max quality and resolution without any slowness.

chamika deshan said...

planning to test ...... game on this VGA :D

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