Installation

As with most videocards, installation was a snap. Press the card in, and screw in the PCI bracket to secure. Don't forget the 6-pin PCI-Express power connection.

One issue I ran into was motherboard-related. The SATA connectors, all six of them, were placed adjacent to the PCI slot directly under the PCI-Express x16 slot. Thusly, the Palit GeForce 9600 GSO blocked all the ports. Thankfully, I was able to fit one SATA cable in, even if it was bending the slot a little.

With the physical installation complete, all that was left was to install the latest nVidia drivers in both Linux and Windows. In Windows, I snagged the latest drivers from nVidia's homepage. In Linux, I merely installed the latest set from Gentoo's repository, which just so happened to be the latest available.

Benchmark Setup

I'll be using the same system I've used in previous videocard reviews, and the system will be running both Windows Vista Business 64-bit with Service Pack 1 and Gentoo Linux 2008.0 64-bit. I'll look at some of the latest games in Windows, and look at a few similar benchmarks in Linux including results from the Phoronix Test Suite.

That said, I'll be able to compare the 9600 GSO directly against the Radeon HD3870 Ultimate and Toxic I reviewed previously. Let's get started with the Windows benchmarks. I'll be looking at performance in 3dMark06 and Vantage, Unreal Tournament 2004, Unreal Tournament 3, Crysis, Quake 4, and Half-Life 2.