PNY 9600 GT OC XLR8

PNY is a relative newcomer to the overclocking game, and we found its first outing - the "XLR8 OC"-branded 9800 GTX - a disappointing start. Now the company has produced an overclocked version of the A-Listed 9600 GT card (click for our review of the standard 9600 GT).

As with the 9800 GTX, PNY has boosted the 9600 GT's core clock speed by 50MHz, here going up from 650MHz to 700MHz. The memory clock has gone up too, from 1.8GHz to 1.9Ghz.

The amount and type of memory is, however, unchanged from the reference design - you still get 512MB of GDDR3. Memory bandwidth increases from a stock 57.6GB/s to 60.8GB.

These are small changes, and, unsurprisingly, the performance improvements we saw were minor. In our low-quality Crysis benchmark - an elementary test for such a powerful card - the XLR8 clocked 141fps, compared to 134fps from the standard 9600 GT.

When we turned up the quality to medium settings, the gap narrowed further, with the XLR8 scoring 53fps against a stock card's 51fps. In our high performance test, we saw no advantage at all, with both cards scoring 22fps.

Results in Call of Duty 4 followed a similar trend. In the medium quality test, the overclocked card hit 94fps, compared to 83fps from a standard card. But in our high test, the cards performed at virtually the same level, with the XLR8 achieving 51fps against a standard card's 49fps.

The 9600 GT is a decent GPU, and overclocking naturally improves performance. But the XLR8 delivers disappointingly small benefits in modern games. It's difficult to recommend it when a reference card can achieve such similar performance at lower cost.

Author: Mike Jennings