| Foxconn GeForce 9500 GT |
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| Written by Jeff_Tom | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 18 August 2008 15:22 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
It took while for Nvidia to follow up the GeForce 8800 GTX video card but they finally did so earlier this year. We've seen some variants on the original DX10 die with the 9800 GT and 9600 GT but nothing on the lower end until now with the GeForce 9500 GT. Today we have one of these cards to look at from Foxconn.
The card shares some basics with the other 9000 series cards mostly DX10 support, PCI-E 2.0 support, and lower power usage. H.264 decoding is also supported. The card can run in SLI and has component output as well as DVI and VGA output.
As with other lower-end cards the hardware bundle consists of the basics of a DVI-to-VGA adapter and an HDTV dongle. A driver CD and installation manual are also included with the card. This 9500 GT from Foxconn features a slight overclock and 256MB of RAM but 9500 GTs do come in other varieties of up to 1GB of RAM.
Here are the technical specs. GPU： NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT
Our test system OS was Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit SP1 with ATI Catalyst 8.5.3 RC1 drivers and Forceware 177.79.
All of the lower-end cards end up in about the same place in Crysis with the 9500 GT pulling down 26.4 fps.
UT3 is a very popular engine and here 9500 GT does a good job but is topped by the new AMD 4670.
In Call of Duty 4 AMD shines particularly well due to some driver enhancements so the 9500 GT is unable to keep up with AMD except for the 3650.
World in Conflict shows how similar this card is to a 8600 GTS.
Again we see the 9500 GT beat the 3650 and 8600 GTS in Relic's Company of Heroes.
In 3DMark however the the 9500 GT actually scores lower than an 8600 GTS.
Power consumption was measured from the wall socket directly from the computer. Idle was taken after 5 minutes into the Windows desktop and Load was tested emphasizing gaming performance and the video card in Crysis' GPU demo.
Again ATI not only is best in performance but in power consumption with PowerPlay likely helping quite a bit when idle.
Conclusion: The 9500 GT ultimately doesn't look that appealing when compared to the 4670 graphics card and both seem weak when compared to a 9600 GT. When that card offers much more performance for the dollar and can be found for only $20 more, we highly recommend taking a look at Nvidia's 9600 GT and saving up your cash than going for the 9500 GT. Of course things could change and the price could come down further but until then, your best bet is to save up or splurge the extra $20 for a GeForce 9600 GT. Pricing: As said a GeForce 9600 GT can be had for around $100 so if you can step up a bit it will provide better performance. There is somewhat of a gap in between $80 of the 4670 and $160 of where the 4850 has settled. The 9500 GT can be had for about $73.
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