Galaxy 9600 GT OC EditionWe received a factory overclocked sample from Galaxy Technologies:
Galaxy Technology was established in 1994 as a manufacturing and distributor of computer components. The head office is located in Hong Kong whereas the factory is located in China. Since long, VGA cards is the prime business of the company and year after year Galaxy grows and develops their know-how. As the group of engineers consists mostly of overclockers, they always want to push the card to the edge by providing n°1 class materials and adapt the card to their needs. The Galaxy 9600GT OverClocked is a perfect example of know-how and guts to re-invent the standards of the 9600 series.
Galaxy 9600GT 512MB | core: 675MHz | shader: 1625MHz | memory: 1000MHz
Quick comparisonIn contrary to the G80 based video cards we don’t have every manufacturer using same the type of Printed Circuit Boards, neither do they use more or less the same kind of GPU cooling, this should make the 9600 GT quite interesting to compare among each other, there might just be few samples out there which allows much higher performance then the reference boards coming out of NVIDIA’s hands. Furthermore, this means that manufacturers have more control over their products so they could make it possible to reduce manufacturing costs in order to further reduce prices. Exotic coolers, weird but nevertheless useful feature, they can be added now. Performance wise, here is how the above samples match up against NVIDIA's reference:
Theoretically, Galaxy should have a small advantage over NVIDIA's reference model, boosting GPU core clocks usually pays off the most and looking at the architecture of this card I doubt it will be much different in this situation. Speed is only one of the things that makes a certain product attractive (or a complete failure instead), there is much more to be told about today's tested product. On the following pages we’ll guide you through a set of pictures which should give you a good view on what Galaxy's sample has to offer you, read on.
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The problem was that one of the standard overclocked cards became instable whenever being put through heavy 3D rendering tasks, downclocking it solved the problem so I guessed we got stuck up with a bugged card (remember the news regarding transient voltage fix on 9600GT's).
Now, nearly one week after launch date, there seems to be something sneaky going on with NV9600 series. NVIDIA has changed the ways clocks are being build up. Earlier, a 27MHz crystal was used, the clock frequency got multiplied and devided until you get the final clockspeed, 650MHz for example. With GeForce 9600GT the GPU core frequency is based on the PCIe speed, the downside here is that my system always is configured with a 110MHz PCIe clock, making the 9600GT used in our article extra overclocked by another 10%!
So... let me warn you here: the results obtained in our article are based on a system using 110MHz PCI-Express clock instead of 100MHz, this difference stands for a 10% overclock on the 9600GT core clock and will have its impact on total system performance.
This being said, we will fix our way of testing in upcoming articles. Those who are still puzzled, don't hesitate to ask around what I was trying to explain here above, but I insist you have a read at our source, thank you techPowerUp!