As for power usage, the 9600 GSO seems take a more power than you might expect. Idling, the card almost took as much juice as the EN8800GTS 512MB, which is a surprise.
One more thing on the topic of power -- like other Sonic models, this Palit card has a 3-phase power solution, which basically means that the GPU is feed a steadier stream of power, resulting in a longer life, and a better overclock, for your card.
... While it has less memory bandwidth available than the 8800 GT, it has a reasonable amount of steam processors, and is set to respectable clock speeds. This combination of specifications leads it to out-perform some more expensive cards, in some games ... you might want to check out the charts and judge for yourself if this card is for you ... the Palit 9600GSO Sonic 768MB is sitting comfortably at the $139 price mark. With the complete bundle (besides the awful manual), the effective cooler, and reasonable overclock, this 9600GSO is selling at the price many other 384MB 9600GSO's are selling at. Speaking of the 384MB configuration of the 9600GSO, Palit will be releasing a Sonic with 384MB of memory, and selling it for $119.99 initally. If that card overclocks as well as the 768MB cards seem to, it could be a excellent budget -- yet still quite fast -- gaming card. While 256MB is not really enough memory to satisfy high-resolution gaming, 384MB (for the time being at least), is an acceptable amount. I would not expect there to be much real-world performance differences at all between the 384MB and 768MB models. However, a possible exception to that claim would be that the 384MB and 768MB cards are from different batches of cards completely -- which isn't likely, but is possible ...
