Date:
Monday , June 08, 2009
Author:
Matthew Krysiak
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Galaxy GeForce 9600 GT LowPower LowProfile

Today we have something a little different for you. We are taking a look at a brand new LowPower LowProfile video card from Galaxy aimed at the HTPC crowd. The Galaxy GeForce 9600 GT LP LP is designed for small form factor systems such as those from Shuttle and Dell. We will be putting it to the test using NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD and CUDA along with power, temperature and overclock testing.

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System Test Setup

For our test system platform we are using an ASUS Blitz Formula motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor at 3GHz, and 4GB of OCZ Technology DDR2 PC2-8000 Platinum. For the power supply, we will be using a Corsair TX750W.

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System Setup

For our testing today we have purposefully left our CPU at stock frequencies, 3GHz, no overclocking is being done. We have done this so that we can better see differences between the CPU doing the dirty work and the GPU doing the dirty work decoding our videos.

We are using Windows Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1 and latest updates at the time of this evaluation. This evaluation was already underway when Service Pack 2 was released. This evaluation was also underway already when Windows 7 RC was released. All future video card evaluations will use Windows 7 RC.

Driver Setup

With the Galaxy GeForce 9600 GT we will be using the latest drivers: ForceWare 185.85 WHQL which include PureVideo HD. Below is GPU-Z screenshots of the Galaxy GeForce 9600 GT after we installed the drivers.

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These clock speeds of the GPU, Shaders and Memory were also verified using NVIDIA’s nTune overclocking utility.