TechRadar.com - Deep into technology

Over the past few months NVIDIA has been pumping out cards like there was a legitimate competitor in the market, and in the 9600GT it has released a card that's made even its own last few releases utterly redundant.

This Sonic version from Palit is overclocked out of the box with a redesigned PCB and cooling solution. As such it looks like a bit of a pig next to the sleek reference design - like an 8800GT with a slightly chunkier fan.

Strong performance

It does make the Sonic a dual slot card, but that enables it to pack on all the connectors you could need, and should allow for some extra clocking if you're feeling that way inclined.

The base 9600GT gives you practically equivalent 8800GT 512MB performance, dropping a couple of frames here and there, but Palit's version eases past it in all tests, and for a fraction of the price.

It may lack the number of stream processors that the 8800s boast, but it still manages to push on through; we'll have to wait and see what the upcoming 9800GTX can do with the full complement.

Great gaming

At last we have a card that will give practically everyone decent DX10 gaming performance.

For just over the magical £100 mark, this is a GPU that should help Microsoft make DX10 gaming the norm, especially with budget PCs available at the moment.

We'll have an in-depth look at the technology behind the card soon, as well as a thorough study of the SLI performance of this new budget wonder.

Until then, all you need to know is that if you can't afford, or can't wait for the 9800 revisions then this is the only card you need concern yourself with.