14 DAY TRIAL // Although these days everybody is talking about AMD's upcoming graphics "champion," the dual-GPU Radeon HD 4870 X2, it seems that some still found the time to have a look at one of NVIDIA's upcoming cards. The conclusion was that, even if it is far from being a top performer, the card does provide some level of interest as it is supposed to replace the current GT and GTS versions of NVIDIA's GeForce 8600 GPU.
The fellows at the Taiwanese forum Xfastest have managed to get their hands on a GeForce 9500GT graphics card and to put it through its paces. The card packed a maximum of 256MB of GDDR3 memory, while the GPU was clocked at factory-set speed of 550MHz. Being entry-level, its clock rates are not that high and that is why the Shaders offer a maximum speed of 1375 MHz, while the memory is clocked at 1600MHz. As was to be expected for this level of performance, the memory is built on a 128-bit interface.
The test was run on a desktop system that was equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor, 2GB of DDR2 memory, clocked at 1066MHz, and an ASUS P5Q motherboard. In order to get some performance scores, the card was tested using 3DMark05, 3DMark06 and FurMark 1.40.
When using the 3DMark05 default settings, NVIDIA's upcoming 9500GT scored a maximum of 12.331 3DMark points. Unfortunately, the performance level dropped significantly, at 5.894, when 3DMark06 was used. With a maximum resolution of 1600x1200, the card was capable of scoring 485 o3Marks in FurMark 1.40.
As you can see from the results, the 9500GT isn't meant to offer the users support for the latest high-end games, but it will do just fine for a office or small home desktop computer system. This G96 GPU, built on the 65nm manufacturing process, will also get along very well with Windows Vista, as it supports DirectX 10.