EVGA 9500 GT Review
Submitted By steven on Oct 1 2008 at 3:28 PM
Introduction
The midrange video card is often seen as the industry's bread and butter. These cards are expected to provide a bounty of features, and a decent gaming experience, for the mainstream market. Providing video solutions for the market at-large can often be a difficult balancing act as companies are expected to provide ever greater performance with less heat and noise output, all at low price. To achieve this goal companies often turn to their tried and true technologies from higher end SKUs and refine them in an effort to maximize performance and price. Typically this means taking their more complex architectures and cutting out portions of the processing units, such as shader processors, ROPs, and TMUs.
Nvidia has done just that with their latest addition to the Nvidia Geforce 9-Series of graphics processors. Positioned just above the entry level 9400GT, is the G96-based Geforce 9500GT. Although its namesake places the 9500GT as a direct replacement for the aging 8500GT, many will see the 9500GT for what it truly is, an improved 8600GT.
| Feature | 8500 GT | 8600 GT | 8600 GTS | 9400 GT | 9500 GT | 9600 GT |
| Shader Units | 16 | 32 | 32 | 16 | 32 | 64 |
| ROPs | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 16 |
| TMUs | 8 | 16 | 16 | 8 | 16 | 32 |
| Transistors | 210 million | 289 million | 289 million | 314 million | 314 million | 754 million |
| Memory Size | 256 or 512 | 256 or 512 | 256 or 512 | 512 or 1024 | 512 or 1024 | 256 or 512 |
| Memory Bus Width | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 12.8 GB | 22.4 GB | 32 GB | 12.8 GB | 25.6 GB | 57.6 GB |
| Core Clock | 450 MHz | 540 MHz | 675 MHz | 550 MHz | 550 MHz | 650 MHz |
| Shader Clock | 900 MHz | 1180 MHz | 1450 MHz | 1400 MHz | 1400 MHz | 1625 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 400 MHz | 700 MHz | 1000 MHz | 400 MHz | 800 MHz | 900 MHz |
The G96 graphics processor relies on TSMC's 65nm manufacturing technology and features 314 million transistors. This is a welcomed shrink from the 80nm G86 equipped with 210 million transistors, used in the aging 8500 GT. Most of these additional transistors lend to the improvements made with G96. These advances include an increased shader processor count (rising from 16 to 32) and an increased TMU count (8 to 16 TMUs). While the 128-bit memory bus is carried over, the memory used can range from DDR2 to GDDR3 or DDR3 technologies.
We will see just how well the G96 stacks up later, with our eximination of the EVGA “512-P3-N954” 512MB 9500 GT graphics card. The Nvidia-reference clock speeds are set at 550mhz core and 1400mhz shader, the memory settings do differ slightly. The 256mb variants, equipped with GDDR3, are specified to run at 800mhz. The 512mb DDR2 varieties (such as our EVGA version) are set to run at 500mhz.
