Blue Devil

Some people started complaining why the 9600GT has such good performance with only 64SPs and almost catchs up with the 8800GT.

After some while, the creator of Riva Tuner discovered that the 9600GT uses a 27mhz crystal instead of a 25mhz to determine the core clock according to the PCI-E clock speed.

The big deal is: The real clock is not the one being shown by the driver(wich calculate it using a 25mhz crystal), the refence model that uses 650mhz are actually working at 702mhz.

And the most curios thing: If you overclock you PCI-E slot(default 100mhz) by 1%, the 9600GTs performance will also increase 1% on MT test on 3DMark06 and it will make the GPU clock work a bit higher!

As you can see on this reviews, there is for sure a relation between the PCI-E clock speed and the GPU clock and the card performance:

techPowerUp! Review :: NVIDIA's shady trick to boost the GeForce 9600GT :: Page 1 / 4
Follow-up to NVIDIA’s shady trick on 9600GT - Expreview.com

My point is: Why didn't they told us anything about that?Who knows, maybe more people would buy the card if they knew it!I guess they have been hidding it for three reasons:

1-nVidia didn't wanted ATI to know about their trick.

2-Maybe it can damage the VGA with the overclock, or even the motherboard.

3-They are going to use the same trick on the upcoming 9 series VGAs and don't want everyone to know how they boosted the G92 performance.So everyone wouldn't know why a VGA with almost the same clocks and same chip(like the 8800GTS and 9800GTX) is much better than the other.

veheATI

Since when people are complaining about having good performance?
this is really upside down....

CDsDontBurn

perhaps this is somehow related to the notorious "black screen" issue that many 9600GTs all across the board are experiencing....

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