February 15th, 2011

Galaxy 9600GT OC

Unreal Tournament 3

Crysis

Unreal Tournament 3 is a first person shooter developed by Epic Games and is the follow up to best selling FPS Unreal Tournament 2004. UT3 is based on the Unreal Engine 3. There is an incredible amount of information about what UE3 supports, but in a nutshell:

Multi-threaded rendering
All modern per-pixel lighting techniques
Advanced dynamic shadows
Volumetric environmental effects including height fog
Split-screen rendering
Physics driven objects and sounds powered by Ageia’s PhysX technology
Extensible particle system with visual editor

For more detailed information on what UE3 is capable of, check out Epic’s Unreal Engine Technology site, here.

Thanks go to the guys at Olrac.org for putting this benchmark together.

Settings

For all Vista tests, DX10 mode was used, and for XP DX9 was used.

High: 1600 x 1200, Level detail 5, model detail 5.
Medium: 1280 x 1024, level detail 5, model detail 5.
Low: 1280 x 1024, level detail 1, model detail 1.

Map: CTF-Omicron-Dawn-bots
No. of Bots: 12
Time: 60 seconds

Something that must be noted before reading the results is that Unreal Tournament 3′s benchmark is based around bots running around a level. This means that the benchmark runs differently each time although the environment is the same. This has an affect on testing which is why we repeat them 3 times and take the average of the scores.

Galaxy 9600GT

In Unreal Tournament, the 9600GT performs much better, staying near level with the 4850 in many tests, and actually beating it at the highest settings under XP.

Overclocking

Using Rivatuner to keep fan speeds up and adjust clocks, I was able to raise the frequency from 675MHZ core and 1000MHZ memory, to 750/1125 respectively. This overclock might not be the biggest around, but it gives a nice little performance bump; who can complain about extra GPU power, for free?

Noise

The fan on this 9600GT isn’t too bad. At idle, the card is very quiet, with only a very slight humming noise. Once the fan starts to spin up though – when it’s under load – it starts to get a bit noisier. Even at 100%, it’s not too bad, but it’s far from comfortable. If you want a good middle ground of cooling vs. noise, set the fan between 50-60%.

Cost

The Galaxy 9600GT will set you back £75. The card we compared it to, the Sapphire 4850 is at least £30 more, with prices ranging from £100 to £115 according to Froogle.