During previous conference call, Nvidia let analysts know that the company is in the middle of the transition to 55nm and that the future will bring only 55nm GPUs with a transition to 40nm at the end of Q1’09.
First victim of this transition is GeForce 9600GSO. As you probably know, 9600GSO is without any doubt, best bang for buck – for as low as 50 bucks after rebate (where available), you can get a renamed 8800GT card with 112 or 96 shaders, and with a bit of cut-down memory controller (192-bits). These cards can overclock as hell, but just like previous GeForce4 Ti4200 and ATI Radeon 9500, their time is slowly coming to an end.
We’ve received word from Zotac that the company launched a new GeForce 9600GSO, based on G94 GPU. This GPU is the same one as in laptops featuring 9700M, so these cards feature 48 shaders (down from 112) and a 256-bit memory controller.
New one looks just like the old one...until you remove the heatsink
Spec-wise, Zotac did all that it could – the company launched its AMP! version of the card, raising the GPU clock by 50 MHz to 700 MHz. Shaders are squeezed all the way to 1.73 GHz (default: 1.63) and memory is clocked at 1.0 GHz DDR (2.0 “GHz”). This brings the available bandwidth to 64 GB/s.
All in all, a good looking card, but if you’re in for shader power, look around for old 9600GSO AMP! – that card was a killer.
