Dressed up to the 9s: NVIDIA G94 - Galaxy GeForce 9600 GT OC review

While NVIDIA have (until the launch of the Radeon HD 3870 X2 at least) enjoyed a comfortable life at the top of the performance tree ever since the launch of their GeForce 8800 architecture, things haven't been quite so easy in the mid-range.  While the GeForce 8600 series also had little in the way of competition, it never really captured the imagination of the masses in the same way as previous parts in this price range from the Santa Clara firm.  More recently, AMD's Radeon HD 3800 launch has allowed them to grab this potentially lucrative slice of the market, offering graphics boards with costs below NVIDIA's current belle of the ball, the GeForce 8800 GT, with decent performance to match.

Of course, the 3D graphics industry being what it is, this status quo was never likely to last for long, and thus the fruits of NVIDIA's attempt to win back the mid-range market are what we see before us today.  As the first board in NVIDIA's GeForce 9 series, the name of this particular product may well conjure images of a brand new architecture, but is the G94 core really all that different from what has gone before, and perhaps more importantly, will it do enough to tempt users away from current offerings in the sub-$200 discrete graphics market?

For our GeForce 9600 GT launch coverage, we'll be looking at one of the first factory overclocked boards to feature this SKU, in the form of Galaxy's GeForce 9600 GT OC, as well as examining reference board performance to boot.  What better way is there to spend a bit of your day than reading about a new graphics core?  Go on, click that 'Next' button, I dare you...