When the Smoke Clears & Prices Settle: GeForce 9600 GT vs. Radeon HD 3870

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.