Clocky, the Galaxian



Nvidia's Geforce 9600GT

It has only been 1 month since the new mid-range from NVIDIA was launched, however this launch was quickly overshadowed by the very high end 9800GX2. Time to turn the spotlight back on this more budget friendly card.

Our colleague reviewer Geoffrey tested this custom Galaxy samples with promising outcome, delivering high performance, silent cooling and above all, an affordable price-tag. However his overclock results in that review were a little bit too basic and boring for us.

While he wasn’t looking we snuck into his test lab and took Galaxy 9600 GT 512Mb Video Card to give it a proper overclocking session.

Let’s quickly recap why the 9600 GT in general, and especially the Galaxy version, makes for a good mid-range video card.

The Galaxy GeForce 9600GT 512MB OC Xtreme Tuner edition:



+ High performance
+ Silent Cooling
+ Lowest consuming mainstream video card
+ Low GPU temperatures
+ Dual BIOS
+ Xtreme Tuner software
+ Tweaked Anti-Aliasing engine
+ Affordable price-tag of ~€180

- Does not add much value for money compared to reference 9600 GT
- Moderate overclock due to issue's in early board design
- not HDMI compatible out-of-the-box

Not long after that article was released, we were informed that the moderate overclocking has little to do with the design of the card itself, but with the design of the 9600GT.

Apparently, NVIDIA decided to change the ways clocks are being build up. Earlier, a 27MHz crystal was used; the clock frequency got multiplied and divided until you get the final clock speed, 650MHz for example. With GeForce 9600GT the GPU core frequency is partially based on the PCIe speed, which makes it possible to overclock the card without the user knowing it is overclocked. Geoffrey's test system had a PCIe bus at 110MHz, and thus the card was running overclocked without him knowing. To read more about this problem, please check out the following articles:

Shady 9600GT trick

3DMark06 practical example, and more info still

Galaxy 9600GT

In our previous Galaxy overclocking article we modified a Geforce 8600 for extreme performance, this time will be no different, here’s what you can expect to find in our 9600 GT article:

Voltage modifications

Performance scaling when overclocking

Air cooled overclocking results

Ln² cooled overclocking results

Let’s get started with the riskiest business first: volt modifications ->