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Leadtek 9600 GT SLI reviewed and compared with 9800 GTX

Videocards/VGA Reviews by geoffrey @ 2008-04-20

With the Geforce 9600 GT pricing reaching new lows, it becomes interesting to see if pairing up two of them can get you more bang for the buck compared to the more expensive Geforce 9800 GTX. In this review we use two Leadtek 9600 GT Extreme cards and run our battery of game tests to find out what performance you can expect.

Inside the box & closed-up pictures

Inside the box

Leadtek Winfast PX9600GT 512MB Extreme

DVI -> Sub-D VGA adapter

DVI -> HDMI adapter

Video out -> S-Video & Component adapter cable

6-pin PCIe to molex power cable converter

SPDIF connection cable

Driver CD and quick install quide

PC Game: Overlord

Specifications

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NVIDIA 65nm G94-A1 core
- core clock: 720MHz
- shader clock: 1750MHz

Samsung 512Mb (8x64Mb) GDDR3 with 256 bit interface
- Memory clock: 900MHz

active heatpipe and fan cooled, single slot aluminium and copper solution

2x Dual Link DVI

native HDMI support

TV-out

Integrated HDTV decoder

2-way SLI ready

PCI-Express 2.0 16x

Dimensions: 23cm x 11cm

Closed-up pictures

Leadteks impressed me with their 9600GT, not only did they add extra performance via a reprogrammed overclocked BIOS, they also made sure that their product is complete HDCP and HDMI ready, and as a surplus they even added a full pc game! The card itself looks a bit like the 8800GT's, it comes with nearly the same board size and single slot cooler, a fast and compact video card it seems, the next best thing in HTPC land?

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The Leadtek PX9600GT Extreme comes with the many basic features found on today’s NVIDIA video cards, just like Galaxy's card found in a previous article it has dual DVI-I video connectors combined with a 9 pins TV-out connector. The card uses a 16x PCI-Express 2.0 compatible bus interface and via a SLI connector you can utilize up to two PX9600GT's inside your gaming setup.

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Off course, the 6 pin power connector is mandatory here too, the connector has been nicely covered in the full cover heatsink which somehow gives this card retro looks.

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The G94 NVIDIA GPU's are HDMI ready, but most card will only come with dual DVI connectors, in order to utilize HMDI Leadtek added a free HDMI dongle. The board itself holds place for a small connector where the added SPDIF cable can be plugged in, this way digital audio will also be available via HDMI cable making the Leadtek PX9600GT Extreme full HDMI compatible.

The back of the board reveals nothing spectacular; the Leadtek 9600GT seems to be based on NVIDIA's reference board design and is powered by a three phase synchronous DC-DC converter. This VRM, named ADP3208A, can be found at the left side of the above picture and is in fact a 7-bit programmable CPU mosfet driver, although that the A might stand for a special designed version aimed for video cards. At this moment we're not sure if it is possible to reprogram the GPU core voltage via this advanced VRM, but theoretical it could be possible that the VGA BIOS and ADP3208A have some kind of serial interface which allows both to communicate with each other.

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People changing heatsinks will have their work, the card counts up to 12 screws, taking those of will results in something like this:

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The memory modules: Leadtek uses the NVIDIA reference 9600GT boards which come with Samsung K4J52324QE-BJ1A GDDR3 chips, also found on Galaxy's card. Maximum rated at 1000MHz at 1,9V, this RAM should yield quite well in our overclocking experiments as NVIDIA actually feeds it with 2V. We found 8 modules each containing 64MB memory space, this results in 512MB for the GPU to store data on, GPU <-> Memory interface is 256 bits wide which is just what this card needs.

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