NVIDIA recently launched a campaign to educate consumers on the benefits of a balanced PC, which features an appropriate mix of CPU and GPU capabilities. The majority of PCs sold today feature integrated graphics solutions from Intel and can be woefully out of balance when the CPU is significantly more powerful than the graphics sub-system.
While this may not affect businesses and consumers who generally rely on 2D graphics operations such as accelerating a Windows desktop, it can have a profound affect on the performance of 3D operations present in Windows Aero, Adobe Acrobat, Google Earth, CAD/CAM applications, 3D games, and DVD/HD video playback.
This is an important consideration that many of our readers are already familiar with, but it is worth mentioning for those readers who are or will likely become disappointed with the 3D performance of existing integrated graphics solutions.
The performance of the Inno3D GeForce 9600 GT iChiLL Hurricane was compared to their GeForce 8800 GT iChiLL model with Artic Cooling, which was recently reviewed here. We also paired the Inno3D GeForce 9600 GT with EVGA's GeForce 9600 GT SSC to demonstrate the benefits of a low-cost SLI (dual graphics cards) configuration.
The Competition - Inno3D's GeForce 8800 GT i-ChiLL
The primary benefit of the GeForce 8800 GT over the GeForce 9600 GT is that is features twice the number of unified processors (128 vs. 64).
Inno3D GeForce 8800 GT i-ChiLL
The following table lists some of the main specifications of the reference GeForce 9600 GT and GeForce 8800 GT.
