Foxconn 9600GT-512NOC Video Card Review

Jason Landals

16 years ago

Sure the NVIDIA 9800 series of video cards are the current crème de la crème of gaming performance, but what if you don’t have the scratch to afford such a beast? Well that’s where the NVIDIA 9600 series comes in. Foxconn sent us over their pre-overclocked 9600GT. As an overclocked card, it should give us a bit more kick than your standard garden variety card. Let’s check it out!

For a few generations now, the x600 series of each NVIDIA chipset has been the midrange workhorse. They generally provide moderate performance at an equally moderate price, and are the cornerstone of many a budget gaming box. The NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT graphics chip is no different; offering performance that should get you into most games and a price that allows you to upgrade to a full SLI rig later on. Eventually, as the product line matures, we’ll see new cards with different memory configurations and feature sets. For now it’s just the base model 9600 GT, with a slight overclocked twist courtesy of Foxconn.

The video card we’re looking at today isn’t just a base GeForce 9600 GT. The tweakers over at Foxconn has taken the stock card and, much like they did to the 9800 GTX we reviewed, have overclocked it to give an extra performance boost. All this is packaged into a single slot design that is said to be both cool and quiet.

As for how much of an overclock Foxconn managed to eke out of this card, let’s run down the numbers. At stock speeds, the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT has a core clock of 650MHz and an effective memory clock of 1800 MHz. Foxconn raised these numbers to 700MHz and 2000MHz on the core and memory respectively all while still using the reference heatsink and fan design. The rest of the specs for this card can be found below. Full details can be found on the product home page.

When it comes to pricing, things become a little muddy to be honest. The Foxconn card itself is somewhat difficult to find in North American retail outlets, but the closest competitors in specification seem to range from $180 to $200 USD. Should you find the Foxconn 9600GT-512NOC video card specifically, it would be reasonable to assume it’ll run in the same price range.

So will this video card be the David to our 9800 GTX Goliath? Or will the comparison be more similar to that of Newton to Hercules? Let’s find out.

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Visual Inspection

With video cards being of such high performance, vendors have to stick closely to the reference designs laid out by the OEM. The case with the Foxconn 9600GT-512NO is no different, as Foxconn has followed NVIDIA’s original layout to the letter. That means a single slot design, with a cooler covering the entire length of the card. Vendors are allowed to add a little bit of flair to the cooler, by way of a decal.

Not only is the Foxconn 9600GT-512NO slimmer than the 9800GTX-512N Extreme, but it’s much shorter. This should make the card a good choice for small form-factor systems where space is at a premium. With that in mind, you should be able to build an SLI rig in a rather compact space.

As for connectivity, Foxconn has included the typical complement of ports found on modern single slot video cards. There’s two DVI ports, and the port used for the video dongle. This dongle supports Composite, S-Video, and Component connections. The card of course supports HDCP, should you wish to connect it to an HDTV and watch high definition content. Should you be without a digital DVI capable display, Foxconn does include two DVI-to-VGA adapters. Unfortunately HDCP information is not passed over this, or any, analogue connection.

For power, the video card only uses a single 6-pin PCIe power connector. Due to the length of the card, the power connector is placed on the back of the card rather then on the side. Now should you not have a PCIe connector coming from your power supply, Foxconn provides an adapter that takes two Molex connectors and converts them into a single 6-pin PCIe connector.

I had mentioned using this card in an SLI array before, and at the price point we expect this card to hit, it’s definitely not a bad idea. However the 9600GT is only setup to support dual card SLI. There’s a single SLI connector on the edge of the card. Next to it is the same S/PDIF connector we saw on the 9800GTX-512N Extreme, and once again there isn’t any mention of this in the manual.

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Accessories

I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail about what else is included in the Foxconn 9600GT-512NOC package. It’s actually exactly the same of the package included in our previous Foxconn 9800GTX review. Included is a general setup manual, and two CDs. The main CD includes a near-as-makes-no-difference nVidia driver (unless you don’t have internet), and the Foxware overclocking utility. The secondary CD contains a Drive copying utility and some CD Drive Emulation software that is along the lines of Daemon Tools.

Under The Hood

With all this talk of the exterior of the Foxconn 9600GT-512NOC video card, I thought it was about time to peel back the cooler and check out what’s underneath. Once again there was a large number of screws used to hold the cooler on. Also being repeated is the overly generous amount of thermal goop applied to the core.

Thankfully this application was much easier to clean off, and eventually I’ll be able to use a much more elegant application of some decent thermal paste. As for the core itself, it’s NVIDIA’s new/old G94 chip. The G94 is actually newer than the G92 that is used in the 9800 GTX, but being less powerful than the G92 it’s more of a baby brother. For those that are keeping track, the G80 is the old chip that was used in the 8800 GTX, as well as the 8800 GTS 640/320 models.

As I noted earlier, Foxconn overclocked this card at the factory. Both the core and memory received a minor performance boost. The core was pushed to 700MHz, a 7% increase in raw speed. As for the memory it was bolstered an additional 10%, for an effective speed of 2000MHz.

With these factory overclocks, one would think that you need a robust power management system. Not really, since as I mentioned the core is less powerful then that found on the 9800 GTX. Still Foxconn went with a series of solid capacitors, allowing for more stable control of the electricity needed to run this card. Hopefully all this attention to detail translates to good results in our suite of benchmarks.

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Testing and Benchmarks

Now that all the pomp and circumstance surrounding introductions is out of the way it’s times to get down to the meat and potatoes of any good video card review: The benchmarks. Normally, this first bit would have a boring graph talking about acoustics, but this card didn’t really produce any results. Our case remained at the same noise level, whether at idle or under full load. The fan never once incrased speed, except for the full speed spin up done on the initial boot up. Other than that, this card was whisper quiet. As for our test rig, here’s the full specifications.

AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition 2.3GHz Quad Core CPU
Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP 790FX Motherboard
OCZ Platinum XTC REV.2 PC2-6400 2GB 2X1GB DDR2-800 Memory Kit
Foxconn 9800GTX-512N Extreme OC Video Card
Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.10 16MB SATA2 Hard Drive
Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU Cooler
Antec P182 Advanced Super Mid Tower Case
Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W Power Supply
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1

Now that we’ve established our benchmarking environment, let’s get on with the numbers!

3DMark 2006

First things first, we need to make with the synthetic benchmarks. That means it’s time to load up 3DMark06 and watch some demo screens…over…and over. Testing was completed using default settings, with only the resolution changing. We chose two of the three most widely used widescreen resolutions, and turned up some interesting results.

It would seem that, at least in 3DMark06, the 8800 GTX performs better than the 9600 GT. The 9800 GTX of course trumped everyone. Anyhow, the Foxconn 9600 GT card posted a performance drop of 4% at 1440×900, and 8% at 1680×1050. Given that 8800 GTX cards are still almost as pricey as the 9800 GTX cards (and about $125 more than the typical 9600 GT card), the 9600 GT still comes out a winner in a price-to-performance comparison. It would be interesting to see how these results scale when a second card is installed and SLI is enabled.

3DMark Vantage

Now it’s time to try out the new kid on the block. 3DMark Vantage has been something that many of us have been asking for, for quite a while. With more and more DirectX 10 titles rearing their heads, a standard way of testing DX10 performance was really needed. The new version does make some changes over it’s predecessor though. The composite score is only generated when you select one of the presets. Should you wish to customize resolutions or other settings, all you get is a GPU and CPU score. That being said the GPU score has far more weighting, and tends to be much closer to the composite score.

This change necessitated the use of two graphs measuring the results of the “Performance” preset, and the “High” preset. The settings for the “Performance” preset are similar to what you would find in 3DMark06. The resolution is set at 1280×1024, and everything is set to medium without and Antialiasing or Anisotropic Filtering. Now due to availability I was unable to include the 8800 GTX in testing, mostly due to the fact that I don’t have it anymore. Anyhow, the 9800 GTX beat the 9600 GT by a not-half-bad 29% overall.

Switching over the “High” presets put a little more strain on things. This time the resolution is ramped up to 1680×1050, all settings are turned to High, and 4x Antialiasing and 8x Anisotropic filtering is added. With all these settings dialled up, the 9600 GT posted a performance delta of 33%. This is fair degree more significant, and should give you an idea of how much performance you can expect for your dollar. The Foxconn 9600GT-512NOC is definitely a good value for the performance offered, but once again I’m left wondering if the difference would be made up with an SLI configuration.

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Supreme Commander

Before we turn things over to those rowdy 3D shooters, we have one more benchmark to run through. Though Supreme Commander’s built in benchmark produces a composite score similar to what you would see from 3DMark, this test is anything but synthetic. This benchmark makes full use of the in-game engine, and plays out a full battle right before your eyes. Both CPU and GPU are tested as the AI, physics, and graphics are rendered in real time.

As for our results, it would seem that at the lower resolutions the 9600 GT is once again beaten by the 8800 GTX. However at 1680×1050, the playing field was levelled. The 9600 GT came into what is effectively a tie with the 8800 GTX, and only posted a 3% drop in performance from the 9800 GTX.

Playability once again was a non-issue with this game. Frame rate drops in RTS games don’t affect the game play very much, unless your game turns into a complete slideshow. Neither was the case with Supreme Commander. The game engine has aged well, and frame rates were always at a level that ensured all the death and destruction of the futuristic battlefield looked quite shiny.

BioShock

We now turn down the road of 3D First Person Shooters. These titles tend to be a little be demanding on video cards. Not only that, but any deviation or drop in frame rates for more than a second can affect game play in a fashion that affects whether your avatar lives or dies. Our first title used for testing is the critically acclaimed BioShock.

This game has been known to put a great degree of stress on the system running in, it especially in the later stages. For the interests of brevity, we used the intro as benchmark. I paid close attention to the fire and water details as they would be the deal breaker in benchmarking. Settings wise, we cranked everything up to high and ran our test on two resolutions. Once again we see the 8800 GTX pull ahead of the 9600 GT in results. This time a 16% and 20% drop in performance was experienced at 1440×900 and 1680×1050 respectively.

The game was still quite playable. In areas of extreme detail and activity, frame rates only dropped into the mid 30s at their lowest. Overall the 9600 GT is still a great performer for it’s price.

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Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

From a popular single player shooter, we moved to an extremely popular multiplayer 3D shooter. Call of Duy 4: Modern Warfare is being hailed by some as a worthy successor to the venerable Counter Strike series. This detail modern tactical shooter makes for quite the run through on our test beds, and has been known to distract a few of our editors from actually working.

For testing, we cranked everything to high and ran through the first mission on our two selected resolutions. In what is becoming a running trend through this review, the 8800 GTX beat out the 9600 GT. Coincidentally, the performance gap between the two cards was 10 FPS on both resolutions. Bearing in mind the price of the 8800 GTX versus the price of the 9600 GT, this is fairly impressive.

The game play was of course rather smooth. Frame rates did drop a little lower in some intense scenes, with numbers posting at or just above the high 20s at the lowest point. I would say that the 9600 GT is shaping up to be a very good value minded card. However I don’t think the 9600 GT should be getting too cocky just yet; we still have one more test to complete.

Crysis

Crysis is truly the great equalizer in these reviews, and is always a good game to end testing with. This fully functional DX10 title puts almost as much stress on video hardware as the 3DMark Vantage benchmarks at the beginning. For testing, we ran the GPU timedemo on high settings at our two chosen resolution. Three runs were completed, and the average was taken of the three. No Antialiasing or Anisotropic Filtering was used in the running of these tests. You shouldn’t be surprised at this point that the 9600 GT lost to the 8800 GTX. At 1440×900 the performance dropped 9% from the 8800 GTX to the 9600 GT, which isn’t too bad. What is bad is the 20% drop at 1680×1050.

At the low frame rates posted by Crysis, this can have a drastic effect on game play. Can, and did. The game wasn’t completely unplayable, but at 1680×1050 the frame rates dropped into the teens on more than a few occasions. I had to drop the resolution from the native res of my LCD to compensate. Even at that, I would say that if you have aspirations towards playing Crysis you’ll want a far more powerful video card. But you already knew that, right? Again, this is where SLI would be a possibility given the price point of this card.

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Final Thoughts and Conclusion

I’m definitely torn on where I stand with the Foxconn 9600GT-512NOC, and the 9600 GT chipset that powers it. The card does post some good performance numbers, and comes in at an awesome price point. However it’s performance numbers aren’t high enough to make it a contender in some game intensive games based of Microsoft’s new DX10 API. It definitely screams “value card.”

The performance of the Foxconn 9600GT-512NOC video card does require some explanation. It does more than sufficient in many popular titles, and posts a great price-to-performance ratio. The 9600 GT is unable to beat the 8800 GTX, but it was never meant to. Add to the good performance the fact that this is an actively cooled card that is extremely quiet, and the appeal of such a product starts to grow. Some might even see the value and scalability in considering this part for an SLI rig on the cheap versus picking up a higher end single GPU.

This card’s strengths are also its weaknesses. The performance is that of a card at this price point, and should you be building a high end gaming rig you are going to want to spend the required money on something more robust. Beyond that, the retail package is still a little spartan.

In the end, those are the only sticking points. This is a great card for the price. Should you be building a budget box, or just wanting to get you feet wet with the intentions (and required capital) to upgrade later, it’s hard to go wrong with the Foxconn 9600GT-512NOC video card. It deserves a strong 8.5 from us, and an award for it’s awesome value.

The Good