• TWEAK
• Hardware
• Grafikkort

Zotac GeForce 9600 GT AMP! Edition (UK)

Introduction:
NVIDIA recently launched the first graphics card in their new GeForce 9000 series. We’re talking about the 9600GT, a mid range graphics card, meant to take over for the GeForce 8800GT and GeForce 8800GTS with 512MB GDRR3 RAM. We’re taking a closer look at the Zotac GeForce 9600GT AMP! Edition, which has been overclocked from the factory.



The GeForce 9600GT is a PCI Express 2.0 graphics card, supporting DirectX 10, but is also compatible with the PCI Express 1.0 slot.

Specifications:
The GeForce 9600GT is bases on the 65mm graphics chip, like the 512mb versions of GeForce 8800 GT and GTS. But apart from these two cards, the GeForce 9600 GT only has 505 million transistors oppose to 754 million, which according to NVIDIA means a power consumption of only 95W for the chip. The graphics card as a unit will use more than that though.

NVIDIA’s stock speed on the GeForce 9600 GT is a core frequency of 650MHz, shader clock at 1625MHz and 1800MHz on the 512MB GDDR3 RAM. From these speeds, there’s a RAM bandwidth of 57.6GB/s.

As with the previous GeForce 8800 graphics card, the GeForce 9600 GT has full support of H.264 for decoding HD material with NVIDIAs PureVideo, which officially is only for Windows XP. If you’ve got Windows Vista, NVIDIA recommends using Cyberlinks Power DVD Ultra codec’s, which can be bought on NVIDIA’s website along with their own PureVideo codec packs.

These are the official specifications for the Zotac GeForce 9600 GT AMP! Edition graphics card:

Graphics Processing Unit - NVIDIA® GeForce® 9600 GT @ 725MHz engine clock - 64 Stream Processors - Dual 400 MHz RamDAC - Max. Resolution @ 2560 x 1600 - True 128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with 16x full- screen anti-aliasing Memory - 512MB GDDR3 - 2000MHz memory clock - 256-bit memory bus Bus Support - PCI Express x16 2.0 (compatible with PCIe x16) 3D Acceleration - Microsoft® DirectX®10 support - Unified Shader Model 4.0 - OpenGL 2.1

And Zotac highlights the following features:

- HDTV Ready - Vista Ready - SLI Ready - HDCP Ready - Dual Link Dual DVI - RoHS Compliant - PureVideo HD - DVI Audio

Along with the release of the GeForce 9600 GT, NVIDIA has released a new ForceWare 174.12 driver. It provides new features for PureVideo like dynamic contrast and improved color control, which should help making an even better and natural picture on the screen. Ideal for HTPC’s.

The new ForceWare driver also supports dual stream decoding, which means that the graphics card can decode two video signals at the same time. 

If you buy the graphics card in Denmark you get two years warranty, but Zotac also provides this, so you should be covered if an accident occurs.

Packaging:
The Zotac GeForce 9600 GT AMP! Edition is packed in a recognizable box with the same colors as their other AMP! Edition graphics cards. On the front there’s a big dragon and a list of the previously mentioned features.



On the back of the box there’s more about DirectX 10 and PCI Express 2.0