PNY GeForce 9600GT 512MB DDR3 PCIE 2.0 (DVI + DVI + HDTV/S-Video Outputs) VCG96512GXPB

[...] It was my first time building a PC so I didn't want to invest too much since I didn't know how things would turn out. I paired it with a e7200, 2 gigs of ram, running on vista 32 bit. The performance is good enough to be well above average for anything made a few years ago. However, once something demanding is ran it starts to chug along a little more that I would like. It could be a bottleneck in my system (either the processor or the RAM), but I have have since OC'd the processor and still get the chugging affect. However these complaints have to be weight against the great price. All in all I'm satisfied. I plan on using this in a secondary PC once I start building a true power PC in the near future. I would recommend this card to anyone who plans on playing slightly older games, and doesn't feel the need to max out all the setting on new games. Also most games are going to run very well at 1900x1200 so keep that in mind if you are buying a new monitor. So don't waste your money on getting a higher resolution monitor than 1680x1250. Of course it could have to do with bottlenecks in my system.

This card is just awesome for the price. It's super fast. It's ridiculously cheap. It runs cool. It doesn't require a lot of power. (I'm running it on a Dell with the stock 305 watt PSU) What else can you ask for? If you're looking for a graphics upgrade, and don't want to spend a fortune, then this card is a winner.

I got this for a good friend of mine because he needed something that will not break the bank and had good power. It plays almost every game on high with very good frame rates. Plus it works at 650Mhz out of the box just like the 180$ superclocked models ! Just make sure you have the latest driver, get it from www.nvidia.com don't use the one that comes with the GPU. Also make sure you have proper cooling inside your case. The price + Performance = good GPU.

This card does indeed speed up graphics well. Now I can't run DiRT at full resolution and detail, but that is perhaps true of all but the highest-performance cards. I'm satisfied with it's performance, though I don't play games like Quake and Crysis. It runs DiRT well enough, and it runs Age of Empires and similar games at full resolution and detail.

Right now is a really great time to upgrade your video card if you haven't already. the Nvidia 9600GT series of cards is a worthwhile upgrade for just about any card more than a year or so old. If you've got any 6000 series or 7000 series Nvidia card, this is an upgrade. If you've got an 8000 series less than an 8800 this is an upgrade.

This card is just a little slower than an 8800GT (with at least 512MB, not the crippled 256MB versions), and priced appropriately. It is on par with ATI's 3800 series cards, and a slower than the ATI's new 4800 series cards that just came out. All of these cards I just mentioned will play ANY recent video games with all of your eye-candy set to High at very playable framerates, and many games (especially older ones) you can set to Very High settings.

At the time of this writing, you can find all of these cards for less than two hundred bucks, with this 9600GT and ATI's 3800 series at the low end of the price spectrum for as low as one hundred after rebates and such if you shop around a bit. Really, this is a great time to buy a video card if you are at all in the market for one (or might be in the near future).

For the people looking for numbers, on my system Vista gives it a 5.9 for both Graphics and Gaming Graphics. 3DMark06 gives it a score of 11200 at stock speed, and slightly overclocked it went up to 12400. Overclocking takes just a few moments with Rivatuner software if you so choose, but even at stock speeds this is plenty fast.

The only things to watch out for is the size of the card (it is fairly long), and make sure you have an adequate power supply. You don't need a HUGE power supply, but you just need a good one and not a generic cheapo one. It requires a separate PCIE power input. This isn't anything out of the ordinary, and any other card in this range you get will need the same thing. The fan is quite loud at startup, but goes down to near silent once the drivers load up.

My system is a Q6600 (overclocked to 3.2Ghz), 8GB RAM, 3x Western Digital 640GB hard drives, OCZ StealthStream 600W power supply, Asus P5B Deluxe motherboard.