Box and bundle

Today's video card comes in a light green box dominated by a giant cyber-frog. A large sticker on the front outlines the important specifications of the card. Unfortunately, there is no information on the box that lists the hardware requirements for the product. And while there are hardware requirements on the video card's manual on the bundled CD, the information is woefully out of date. The manual lists the requirements for this card as a free AGP slot, a Pentium II processer, and 64 MB's of RAM!

Not to dwell on it too much, but the Palit 9600 GSO's manual is the least helpful, and the least complete, that I've have ever seen supplied with a video card. It is in dire need of a rewrite. Palit does not offer toll-free tech support so, if you had do something that you were unfamiliar with -- such as connecting your video card to a HDTV for instance -- you'd would not find much help without having to resort to Google, or perhaps, an agreeable local nerd.

The bundle includes a driver CD, a HDMI to DVI adapter, a VGA to DVI adapter, a SPDIF to RCA audio cable, a molex to PCIE power adapter, a S-video out cable, and a quick-start installation guide. For a card in this price range, this is a very complete bundle.

Overclocking

'Sonic' editions are Palit's overclocked line, so this 9600 GSO runs at 600 / 1500 / 1800 (core / shader / effective memory speed), which is a healthy increase from the card's default 550 / 1375 / 1600 clocks. Usually with pre-overclocked video cards, you generally can't get your hopes up that high that there will be much more gains to be had. But this card is a bit different. The 9600 GSO is basically a 8800 GS, and the 8800 GS where basically 8800 GT cards with less stream processors activated. With the Palit overclock, the 9600 GSO has the same clock speeds as a 8800 GT -- so, it stands to reason that there would be some additional headroom to be gained with a bit overclocking. The card's nice cooler, and metal back plate which helps cool the memory, also doesn't hurt the overclocking potential either.

Using RivaTuner, we started the overclocking adventure at a modest 640 / 1600 / 1860. This card seemed to have absolutely no troubles with that at all, so we kept on going further. We eventually settled on a 729 / 1836 / 1900 and the card still was running crash-free. It wasn't until we reached 745 / 1862 / 1958 that the super-Sonic 9600GSO started running into stability problems after five hours of overnight stress testing. Operating this card at a very zippingly fast 742 / 1858 / 1954 clock should not cause you that much trouble though, which is a very impressive 24% / 24% / 9% overclock.

(By the way, if you are going to go the overclocking route with this card, I'd recommend directing any spare fans you may have lying around right onto the back metal plate of the card. This will help prevent your memory from overheating, and should make your system more stable. Of course, if you have a six fan computer case or something similar, than you can safely ignore this advice.)