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You could make an entire graphics card lineup just from all the different cards that nVidia has sold under this same 9600GSO name.

On the high end, you'd take the 9600GSO's sold by galaxy early on which actually had 512mb of RAM onobard, and unlock them to being the same as the 8800GTS. (you can flash them with the 8800GTS bios to unlock the extra shaders, RAM, and memory bus)

Then, you'd have the traditional 9600GSO 768mb card, followed by the 384mb version.

Next down the line you'd have this card. It has the 96 shaders of the 384/768mb 960GSO's, yet a slower 128 bit memory interface. Of course, putting 1gb of RAM onto a card with a 128 bit memory interface is completely useless, this offers little benefit over even 256mb of RAM.

For your low end, you could use the 9600GSO with only 48 shaders, less than half of the amount of the original 9600GSO.

Why does nVidia keep putting out new cards with the same name? How can you like a company which uses such a blatant bait-and-switch strategy to fool consumers into buying slow, expensive cards?

Remember the old 8800GTS? And more recently the GTX 260? One name, multiple cards.

Of course, they also like running the same card with multiple names. The 8800GS has been renamed 4 times now, appearing in the 8xxx. 9xxx, 1xx and 2xx generations.

As for this card, it's a terrible deal. Between the 128bit bus and the older slower GDDR3 memory, this is not a gamer card. The slow memory bus will be a huge bottleneck on performance.

At $70 you can get a much faster Radeon 4830 right now, or if you wait a week, you'll probably be able to get an even faster Radeon 4730 for this price.

The real deal here is the game bundle, not the card.

Admittedly, it's not that great a deal either way - both games retail for about $90 combined now, so you'd need to have a burning desire to save $20 on both games via a mail-in rebate... and then you'd have to do something with this card that can't even run either game at high resolutions.

The most glaring stupidity is this is a GB of DDR2...
As others have pointed out previously this card is not much more than most better 9500GT, which isn't a gaming card. XFX is saying this is a 96 shader and not a G94 version with 48... doesn't that just warm your heart.

Here's a $30 card that would probably kick this thing... remember the 8600GTS... Yes a sweet 128-Bit 256Mb of DDR3.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130394
This POS isn't a deal it's how to dump crap waffers on suckers. What it tells you is this should be $35-40 when you consider all the parts, manufacturing and place in the performance realm.

#2 -- Never... Never, make a buying assessment for a card based on what free games they are trying to sucker you with.
This card won't most likely run those titles with any real aplomb at what most have as the native resolution for their LCD panel.

While Ebent probably has them both for $15 shipped.

That's why I tacked on the bit at the end, #3.

Today given the cost and prevalence of panels, 1680X1050 isn't high, more mainstream. While some might argue budget...

This is an older Review/B-M, but has all the normal players that are in this price range, plus an old 8600GTS. You can see how the orginal (best) 9600GSO places while this gledded POS might be ever so slighty above the 8600GTS, while face it not in 7900GTX territory.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/HD_4670_IceQ_Turbo/2.html

AGP 7800 GS Cards do better than this. Why waste ur money?

Who brought this floundering worthless card on the deck?
First take a big stick and smash this card out of it's misery, then turn and beat some sense into the green marking team.
Maybe it can help them think up a real strategy!

<table width="90%" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3" border="0" align="center"><tr> <td><span class="genmed"><b>CompWiz17 wrote:</td> </tr> <tr> <td class="quote">You could make an entire graphics card lineup just from all the different cards that nVidia has sold under this same 9600GSO name.

On the high end, you'd take the 9600GSO's sold by galaxy early on which actually had 512mb of RAM onobard, and unlock them to being the same as the 8800GTS. (you can flash them with the 8800GTS bios to unlock the extra shaders, RAM, and memory bus)

Then, you'd have the traditional 9600GSO 768mb card, followed by the 384mb version.

Next down the line you'd have this card. It has the 96 shaders of the 384/768mb 960GSO's, yet a slower 128 bit memory interface. Of course, putting 1gb of RAM onto a card with a 128 bit memory interface is completely useless, this offers little benefit over even 256mb of RAM.

For your low end, you could use the 9600GSO with only 48 shaders, less than half of the amount of the original 9600GSO.

Why does nVidia keep putting out new cards with the same name? How can you like a company which uses such a blatant bait-and-switch strategy to fool consumers into buying slow, expensive cards?

Remember the old 8800GTS? And more recently the GTX 260? One name, multiple cards.

Of course, they also like running the same card with multiple names. The 8800GS has been renamed 4 times now, appearing in the 8xxx. 9xxx, 1xx and 2xx generations.

As for this card, it's a terrible deal. Between the 128bit bus and the older slower GDDR3 memory, this is not a gamer card. The slow memory bus will be a huge bottleneck on performance.

At $70 you can get a much faster Radeon 4830 right now, or if you wait a week, you'll probably be able to get an even faster Radeon 4730 for this pric... [Truncated]

You pathetic halfwits talking to yourselves as usual about nothing.

May not be a good choice for a single card at $70, may not make use of 1GB memory at what it can play, but that's a fairly trivial matter since legacy memory is so cheap, it's not like it substantially raised the price of the card or anything.

Just sayin', no reason to hate on the price of memory these days.

#11 -- I would completely agree with that... If the extra memory is basically add minimal cost I wouldn't shy away, if the rest of the spec's are the reference or better.

I don't think engineers had to create this as much as they had to build as Marketing guys demand, hoping to pull some smoke and mirrors. I say #8 had it right.