When the Smoke Clears & Prices Settle: GeForce 9600 GT vs. Radeon HD 3870
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 22, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
As we suspected in our original review, the GeForce 9600 GT and Radeon HD 3870 are quite competitive with one another thanks to AMD's most recent price cuts.
From a performance standpoint, the Radeon HD 3870 comes out slightly ahead by outperforming the 9600 GT in one more game (and two benchmarks). The 9600 GT, although winning fewer benchmarks, manages a higher margin of victory in those games that it does win in. Performance issues in Quake Wars and Call of Duty 4 give the nod to NVIDIA, especially when you take into account a lower average selling price for the 9600 GT.
Looking back at our power consumption numbers, the 9600 GT does run a bit cooler under load, while the 3870 has a lower thermal envelope at idle. Neither card has a passively cooled reference design, so HTPCers will either want to look for something aftermarket or go further down the food chain for a truly silent PC.
If you're deciding between overclocked and stock 9600 GTs, EVGA's SSC version showed a 10% increase in performance for just over a 12% increase in price. The problem is that if you can afford a 12% increase in price over a stock 9600 GT, you may want to start looking at even faster GPUs.
Next week we'll have a follow-up looking at how the 9600 GT stacks up to the 512MB Radeon HD 3850 and the almighty 8800 GT 512.
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qquizz - Wednesday, March 12, 2008 - link
I am looking forward to this, "Next week we'll have a follow-up looking at how the 9600 GT stacks up to the 512MB Radeon HD 3850 and the almighty 8800 GT 512."Cenarius - Tuesday, March 4, 2008 - link
Final sentence in review reads:"Next week we'll have a follow-up looking at how the 9600 GT stacks up to the 512MB Radeon HD 3850 and the almighty 8800 GT 512."
Been checking daily, and now we're heading into the middle of the week AFTER next week, so where's the follow-up already? :-|
ufoall - Monday, March 3, 2008 - link
may i know what will be the price after 2 months...BenSkywalker - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
A quick comment-The eVGA 675MHZ clock and MSI 700MHZ clocked part are both available from New Egg for 179.99. Obviously neither are clocked to 740 but the MSI part is closer to the SSC then stock and sits at the 'regular' MSRP.
Samus - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
Hard to believe you can have a card that play's Crysis this well for < $200.Crysis 1600x1200 at 40+FPS
Xajel - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
wonder why Anandtech didn't test both cards with overclocking in mind, I think it will be very intersting, and even the OC results for 9600GT was only compared in persentage to it self, I hope to see more detailed comparition for these two babiesdingetje - Monday, February 25, 2008 - link
i agree, and i'm most interested in oc'ing results of the cards with non stock cooling and the faster memory installed (0.8 or 1 ns memory)araczynski - Sunday, February 24, 2008 - link
sounds to me like the smart money's on waiting for the 9800 series to come out and leaving this neutered dog for the OEM's to put into their systems and brag about.strafejumper - Sunday, February 24, 2008 - link
would like to see this new card compared to a 8800 GT 512MB in price, performance, and price/performancesolitude1951 - Saturday, February 23, 2008 - link
This is sorta off topic but it looks like a good place to get reliable info. I've got an old Dell 8400. It's got the 3.4 gig chip with raid on. Will my computer even run one of the cards being discussed. I can't afford a new computer but I need more speed. UT3 demo stutters at the lowest display settings. Any advice?