NVIDIA has been getting very good at topping themselves with each new product launch. Just two short months ago, the dual-GPU GeForce 9800 GX2 arrived on-scene and crushed the competition. Mere days later the GeForce 9800 GTX launched and offered a decent price point for a modern replacement of the GeForce 8800 GTX. But all of these high-level products leave a big hole in the low- and mid-income segments of the enthusiast markets. Everyone like to game, right?

It doesn't happen very often, but occasionally NVIDIA offers a rough diamond that compete with all of those polished gems. We last witnessed this phenomenon in the GeForce 8800 GT video card product launch. Back then, an upper-crust mid-level graphics card was handing out pink-slips to some of NVIDIA's most expensive crown jewels. So imagine the value in a card based on binned-down G92 GPU's but still delivers excellent performance with plenty of scalability for high-resolution monitors. Because it's part of the GeForce 9-series family, it can offer a vast array of multimedia capabilities, but without the cost of a higher level product. Enter the Palit GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Sonic graphics card SKU NE/960TSX0202.

In the past, Benchmark Reviews has compared GeForce 8800 Graphics Performance: GT vs GTS vs GTX. In that article, it was shown that a more affordable 8800 GT could easily beat a heavily-overclocked 8800 GTS and close the gap with far more expensive 8800 GTX. Not much later we tested the ZOTAC GeForce 8800 GT AMP! Edition HDMI video card which in many tests performed very near to the more expensive 8800 GTX. So now that NVIDIA has realized that there's a growing market of multimedia enthusiasts who aren't ready to drop coin on a top-shelf graphics solution just to have HDMI or DisplayPort capabilities. This is why the Palit GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Sonic graphics card proves that video cards don't have to be so narrow-minded.

Powered by the NVIDIA G94 graphics processor, which is a scaled down G92 GPU with half the cores disabled, the Palit GeForce 9600 GT video card rakes-in higher mid-level performance at the price of low-end graphics. The new PCI Express 2.0 interface sends data at rates up to 5.0 GBps, which then uses the memory bus to build an enormous 1024 MB video frame buffer for smoother performance and realistic textures in PC games. The 1000 MHz (2 GHz DDR) video memory on the 9600 GT communicates with a fast 700 MHz G94 graphics processor through a 256-bit memory interface. For an extra performance boost during intense gaming situations, NVIDIA has designed the 9600 GT to offer 64 stream processors operating at the unmatched 1750 MHz shader speed.

You can read the entire article at Benchmark Reviews.