Alarm bells rang when Nvidia announced its latest 9-series card. Research reveals that the 9600 GSO is identical to the old GeForce 8800 GS, with the same 550MHz core clock speed, 96 stream processors, and 384MB of GDDR3 memory.

Palit, though, has attempted to wring more performance out of the older architecture with a range of frame rate-boosting enhancements.

The core clock, for instance, now runs at 600MHz; the shader clock has also increased, from 1,375MHz to 1,500MHz, and the memory has doubled to 768MB.

These alterations contribute to slight performance boosts over both the old 8800 GS and the newer 9600 GT. The low benchmark was easily handled, but the medium test was a tightly contested affair, with only 5fps between the slowest card of the three – the 8800 GS, with 49fps – and the fastest, which was the 9600 GSO. The 9600 GT ran at 51fps.

The cards struggled in our high settings Crysis test, where there was only a frame of difference between the 8800 GS, at 22fps, and the two 9600 cards, which both ran at 23fps.

Luckily, there are a few areas where this “Sonic” 9600 GSO offers more than its rivals. The 768MB of memory provides more headroom for forthcoming games than the 9600 GT, which has 512MB of GDDR3, and the 384MB of the standard GSO and 8800 GS. It’s quiet, too, compared with the irritating whirring of the 8800 GS.

These are minor pluses, though, for a card that’s too mediocre to stand out in a crowded market. Performance is only slightly faster than the competition, even with Palit’s overclocking. And a standard 9600 GT will cost around the same and doesn’t need to be pushed to its limits like this – you could even overclock it yourself – so we’d stick with that over the GSO for now.