The video card market has changed in the last few weeks with the launch of the GeForce GTX280 and GTX260 from NVIDIA and the launch of the ATI Radeon 4870 and 4850 cards. The upheaval on the graphics card market by these releases has caused video cards like the 9600GT to drop drastically in price so different cards with different performance characteristics are priced similarly. This is good for the consumer as the lower priced video cards offer higher performance than before but bad for the cards like the 9600GT and HD3650 which were designed under a different era and different .

The GeForce 9600GT was the second G9x series chip after the G92 that formed the basis for the 8800GT video card and was launched in early 2008 as the successor for the 8600GT card. It offered high performance for a price of $199 and at launch was quite successful. Gigabyte has released several 9600GT cards and today I’m reviewing a 1GB passively cooled 9600GT called the Gigabyte 9600GT TurboForce Edition. The release of new drivers for PhysX enabling on GeForce 9xxx series cards and above means that I will cover that feature here for the first time.