Derrick
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The ECS 9500GT will not revolutionise your gaming experience, nor will it allow you to run ultra-high resolutions, but it is a worthwhile upgrade for anyone using any integrated graphics controller. With a strong feature list, there isn't anything to fault this card on, as it performs well for the price point.
Apart from NVIDIA’s 8800 series,the first generation of DirectX 10-capable GPUs from NVIDIA was disappointing. The 8600 was not much of an upgrade over the 7600GT from early 2006, and the same can be said about the 8500GT, which was just not worth the money, as performance was so low, one was really buying DirectX10 capability but most certainly not the functionality.
Fortunately, however, the era of the underperforming mid- to low-end 8-series cards is over, and NVIDIA has replaced virtually the entire 8-series line-up with the GT200 and G9X cores.The 9500GT is, as the name suggests, part of the GeForce 9 family of products and it has just about every feature that the more expensive 9800GTX has – apart from the performance and the price to match.
Essentially, the 9500GT is a renamed 8600GT. From what the specifications suggest, it’s almost identical to the outgoing 8600GT (replaced by the 9600GT). However, scratch just beneath the surface of the GPU, and you’ll notice that the core is bigger in terms of gate count, but smaller in
physical size.
It features 104 million more gates than the part it replaces (the 8500GT), and 25 million more than its closest 8-series performance equivalent, the 8600GT.
Built on the 65nm process as opposed to the 80nm process the 8500 and 8600 cards were manufactured on, it’s not only cooler and marginally faster clock for clock because of the die shrink,but is also clocked higher and consumes less power.
It features the same 128-bit wide memory bus, but sports 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at a healthy 1,600MHz (800MHz SDR), which gives it more than twice the memory bandwidth of the 8500GT and a 4GB/sec advantage over the 8600GT.
This boost in memory bandwidth means that the 9500GT not only handles higher resolutions, but the performance is significantly better than it was on the 8500GT and the 8600GT.
With NVIDIA having enabled physics capabilities on all its 8- and 9-series graphics cards, whether you use the 9500GT for physics acceleration only or as your primary VGA card, the performance is vastly superior to the 8500GT.
In terms of HD playback, there isn’t anything different between the 8500 and the 9500GT. A few improvements have been made to the PureVideo HD-acceleration capabilities, but nothing that will have a visual impact on the rendered picture.
The ECS 9500GT features a DVI-to-HDMI converter, a DVI-to-VGA converter and an audio lead, which allows an encoded audio signal to pass through to your sound card.
A user manual and a driver disk are also included, as one would expect. If a 9500GT is what you need, you may as well start with the ECS 9500GT.
Apart from NVIDIA’s 8800 series,the first generation of DirectX 10-capable GPUs from NVIDIA was disappointing. The 8600 was not much of an upgrade over the 7600GT from early 2006, and the same can be said about the 8500GT, which was just not worth the money, as performance was so low, one was really buying DirectX10 capability but most certainly not the functionality.
Fortunately, however, the era of the underperforming mid- to low-end 8-series cards is over, and NVIDIA has replaced virtually the entire 8-series line-up with the GT200 and G9X cores.The 9500GT is, as the name suggests, part of the GeForce 9 family of products and it has just about every feature that the more expensive 9800GTX has – apart from the performance and the price to match.
Essentially, the 9500GT is a renamed 8600GT. From what the specifications suggest, it’s almost identical to the outgoing 8600GT (replaced by the 9600GT). However, scratch just beneath the surface of the GPU, and you’ll notice that the core is bigger in terms of gate count, but smaller in
physical size.
It features 104 million more gates than the part it replaces (the 8500GT), and 25 million more than its closest 8-series performance equivalent, the 8600GT.
Built on the 65nm process as opposed to the 80nm process the 8500 and 8600 cards were manufactured on, it’s not only cooler and marginally faster clock for clock because of the die shrink,but is also clocked higher and consumes less power.
It features the same 128-bit wide memory bus, but sports 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at a healthy 1,600MHz (800MHz SDR), which gives it more than twice the memory bandwidth of the 8500GT and a 4GB/sec advantage over the 8600GT.
This boost in memory bandwidth means that the 9500GT not only handles higher resolutions, but the performance is significantly better than it was on the 8500GT and the 8600GT.
With NVIDIA having enabled physics capabilities on all its 8- and 9-series graphics cards, whether you use the 9500GT for physics acceleration only or as your primary VGA card, the performance is vastly superior to the 8500GT.
In terms of HD playback, there isn’t anything different between the 8500 and the 9500GT. A few improvements have been made to the PureVideo HD-acceleration capabilities, but nothing that will have a visual impact on the rendered picture.
The ECS 9500GT features a DVI-to-HDMI converter, a DVI-to-VGA converter and an audio lead, which allows an encoded audio signal to pass through to your sound card.
A user manual and a driver disk are also included, as one would expect. If a 9500GT is what you need, you may as well start with the ECS 9500GT.