Over the past few months, every graphics card that’s been released has been focused on the gamer. It seemed that both NVIDIA and AMD had forgotten about those people who only want to do a little bit of light gaming while spending as little as possible. That’s all just changed, however, with the release of the new 9500 GT from NVIDIA which brings a new graphics card to that low $100 price bracket and under.
The 9500 GT has launched in two versions; the first is a cheaper GDDR2 model which starts at around the $70 mark and the other is a slightly more expensive GDDR3 model that starts at around the $90 mark. Today we have with us the latter version from Leadtek which sports 512MB of GDDR3 memory.

While both the GDDR2 and GDDR3 models come with the same 550MHz core, the memory clocks on both are different. The cheaper GDDR2 model comes in at quite a low 1,000MHz DDR memory clock while the pricier GDDR3 model comes with a much more respectable 1,600MHz DDR. Other specs include 314 million transistors, 32 stream processors, 8 ROPs and 16 texture filters to make up the rest of the card.

At the moment the card is based on a 65nm design, but NVIDIA have already stated that in the coming months they will transition to a 55nm design which will drop temperatures and give us the ability to have the card clocked a little higher. Another change that NVIDIA are going to incorporate soon is the ability for the card to support PhysX with a driver update.

Most companies are offering active and passive cooled cards, though the particular Leadtek model we’re looking at today comes with a single slot cooler that has quite a large fan on it to keep the card as cool as possible. With the help of the active cooling solution, they have pushed the card up 25MHz on the core making it 575MHz which should aid in giving us a little bit more performance for your dollar.

Another difference between the two cards is the GDDR3 model from Leadtek including our standard TV-out port along with two Dual-Link DVI connectors while the cheaper GDDR2 model comes with only a single Dual-Link DVI connector and a single VGA port alongside the TV-out port.

Inside the box there isn’t a whole lot going on due to the card being in the lower end segment of the market. Apart from the manual and driver CD we also have a component/S-Video out dongle and a single DVI to VGA connector included.

Looking at the performance side of things, there isn’t a whole lot going on as you would expect for a card of this price. Performance sits at about half the speed of the 9600 GSO which costs roughly 50% more, making the GDDR3 version of the 9500 GT pretty poor value. And while you could do a bit of light gaming at lower resolutions like 1,280 x 1,024 or 1,024 x 768, we would probably recommend that you save the extra $50 or so dollars to make the jump to a 9600 GSO which when overclocked offers almost identical performance to the 9600 GT.

Ultimately, the 9500 GT really is a bit too expensive for what it is and makes the 9600 GSO and 9600 GT look like even better valued cards. The limited bundle, low performance and higher than expected price tag make the card on a whole pretty poor value when compared to the aforementioned products. If you’re looking at getting away from onboard graphics you would be best to buy the cheaper GDDR2 version or really take the time to save for a slightly higher end model in the 9600 series.