Currently, NVIDIA doesn't really offer a great deal for those looking to buy a mid-range video card, and ATI's Radeon HD 3850 and HD 3870 look simply great, especially after the latest price drops. Anyway, that doesn't mean NVIDIA sleeps. Although not quite something new, the 9600 GSO card was released earlier today, to fill the area below the 9600 GT(or even above), so let's see what's new and what's old with it, shall we?


First, I should explain why I am not sure where to place the 9600 GSO when compared to its predecessor, the 9600 GT. While the 9600 GT has only 64 stream processors, the 9600 GSO has 96 of them, but its memory bandwidth is lower - 38.4GB/s vs. 57.6GB/s, so I guess we'll have to wait for the first reviews to decide which one is better, and most important, which one delivers the best bang for your buck. Despite its lower memory bandwidth, texture fill rate is better for the 9600 GSO, with 26.4 billion vs. 20.8.

As we heard before, the 9600 GSO is, practically, a rebranded 8800 GS, using the G92 GPU, with 48 texturing units, 12 render back ends and 192-bit memory bus. NVIDIA recommends its partners to put 384MB of GDDR3 memory running at 1600MHz on these boards, but we didn't hear anything about pricing yet...

Since NVIDIA claims the 9600 GSO offers "amazing graphics performance within your reach," I hope to see this card becoming available somewhere around $130, but can't really tell that yet. Anyway, we'll find out pretty soon, you can bet on that!