Nouveau For A $10 NVIDIA Graphics Card?

The GeForce 9 series supports OpenGL 3.1 and Microsoft DirectX 10 feature levels. The GeForce 9600GSO can handle multi-GPU SLI, PureVideo HD, PhysX, and CUDA compute. SLI and PureVideo HD both work under Linux when using the binary-only NVIDIA driver. PureVideo HD is exposed, of course, through the wonderful VDPAU video acceleration interface in their graphics driver.

The heatsink fan that XFX installed on their GeForce 9600GSO 512MB model is not from NVIDIA's reference design but rather is a simple two-pin-fan aluminum heatsink. Sadly, this fan is extremely loud, but more on that later in the article.

The graphics card has a dual-link DVI output and one HDMI output. Some GeForce 9600GSO graphics cards -- including the GeForce 9600GSO reference design -- have a 6-pin PCI Express power connector as the maximum power draw is 105 Watts. However, this PCI Express 2.0 graphics card from XFX manages to squeeze by without an external 6-pin PCI-E power adapter (as said on the previous page, the core clock is running 50MHz less, etc).