Gainward BLISS 9600GSO 768 Mb: does much video memory make much sense?
Our recent tests have shown that many modern video cards may lack the video memory capacity. Once the video card's own memory capacity turns insufficient, the system starts using up part of the RAM. The idea is fine, but in practice this frequently results in performance drop, and sometimes a failure in the video card operation. This is especially painful for GeForce video cards which show greater performance drop with the video memory capacity being equal with that for Radeon video cards. That is why today our attention has been drawn by Gainward BLISS 9600GSO 768 MB that offers twice times as much of video memory capacity than that for the "regular" GeForce 9600GSO 384 MB. Our research has shown that 384 MB of video memory may prove insufficient for playing games in quality modes. For the time that has passed, new video cards have appeared on the market, and prices for old video cards, including GeForce 9600GSO, have gone down. It is interesting to find out if an inexpensive video card of the 9600GSO class of greater video memory capacity and overclocking capability is able competing against more powerful and expensive video cards. That will be the subject of our today's review.
Gainward BLISS 9600GSO 768 MB is packaged in a standard box . There are differences, albeit minor.
The package bundle of the video card includes:
- power supply adapter for PCI-Express video cards;
- DVI -> D-Sub adapter;
- S-Video -> RCA adapter (S/P-DIF sound input);
- S-Video > Component out adapter;
- CD with drivers and a user's manual.
- CD with software for DVD;
- user's guide;
Even without removing the cooling system, it is easy to see that Gainward BLISS 9600GSO 768 MB is made following the same PCB design as the more expensive Gainward BLISS 8800GTS 1024 MB (). Externally, the video cards differ in only the size of cooling plates installed on the reverse side of the PCB.
The cooling system is made up of three parts: the first one cools the GPU chip, the other two - the memory chips.
The PCB design provides placement of 16 memory chips, and merely 12 of them are installed. The bus bit rate of the memory bus was cut down to 192-bit, therefore, the amount of onboard video memory has been reduced to 768 MB.
The memory chips are made by Qimonda and offer 1.0 ns access time, which is equivalent to the effective frequency 2000 MHz.
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