"Green" is a powerful marketing buzz-word and it's hard to find a brand in any market these days which hasn't tried to cash in on the concept one way or another. XFX, our Hong Kongian hardware friend, is no exception and on GP lab's bench today are two of their so-called Green Edition video cards based on the Nvidia Geforce 9600GT and 9800GT chipsets, both of which are currently available from PlayTech.

Green Power.

The thing that makes these cards "green" is the fact that neither model requires the usual 6pin PCI-E power adaptor needed by basically all other mid-range video cards on the market today. This means that their power consumption will be less than or equal to the 75W available to the GPU via the motherboard's PCI-E slot. By comparison, the most powerful ATI card which does not require the external power connector is the HD 4670, which by most accounts gets thoroughly pounded by the 9600GT in games.

So what benefit does this provide? Physically lacking a 6pin power connector in itself is not really a selling point - most cards with this connector come with a PCI-E to molex power adaptor so that you can power the card via a spare molex plug, and running out of molex plugs is rarely a problem for many people. What is handy however, is the reduced power draw. If you have an úber-budget off the shelf PC with a weakling PSU then you are probably hesitant to adding new hardware, particularly 3D graphics cards which typically require a lot of grunt.

Take a bargain-basement 250W power supply for example - these would have at least 16 amps available on the 12v power rail, meaning about 190W available to the CPU and video card. A lot of CPU's these days are rated at 65W, so coupled with a 75W video card, you would be comfortably squeezing about 140W out of the power supply's 12v rail, even during intense gaming. Positively miniscule!

Power supply capability aside, there are other potential benefits like power saving. Just as an example, let's compare the energy consumption and cost of a 75W video card to one that pulls 175W. If you gamed for 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year (I pray you don't take your rig with you on holiday), the lower powered card would save you approximately $12.50 over the course of a year. Wooooooo, I hear you say. Indeed.

Slightly less tangible is the reduction in your carbon footprint. I can scientistically guesstimate that this power efficiency is the equivalent of hugging precisely 3.75 trees and saving 2 small furry woodland creatures from a bulldozer. The added carbon that I emitted testing these cards over the course of a week will negate some of that however. Take that, you rascally rabbits.

Specifications.

This is how the cards stack up, spec-wise:

This shows that the cards are actually slightly underclocked compared to their normal full-powered brethren, most notably the memory speed which is usually 1800MHz for both models. This obviously is where XFX have found the best power savings to be had.

Accessories.

Both cards come with a copy of 3DMark Vantage, presumably to show off the PhysX capability. They also come with SVHS video-out cables and DVI to VGA adaptors. The 9600GT even comes with a DVI to HDMI adaptor and audio loop-through cable. Not sure why the 9800GT doesn't come with this, but them's the breaks.

To top it all off both cards come with a download voucher for 3DMark Vantage, and an ultra-geeky "I'M GAMING" doorknob sign, which I presume is so people won't get the wrong impression about why you spend so much time alone in your room.

The cards.

As you can see from the pictures each card has a single-slot fan with aluminium fins. The theme is sleek black and green typical of XFX, with even the DVI sockets conforming to the colour scheme. As well as the two DVI connections there is also a socket for the TV out dongle.

Before even plugging the cards in, I'm sceptical about the cooling system. Fans as small as this generally have to spin quite fast to be effective, which means more noise, and smaller fans have higher frequency whines which can be more annoying than the low hum of bigger fans. Being "Green" I would have thought XFX would try to aim for some sort of passive solution to minimise noise pollution but evidently not.

Physical features aside, you also get the full complement of Nvidia GPU technologies like CUDA (which uses the video card to perform certain processing functions much more efficienty than a CPU can), PhysX (which enhances physics effects in certain games), and SLI (the ability to run two of the cards in tandem on an SLI capable motherboard to increase gaming performance).

Performance.

These cards are designed primarily for gaming so it would be wrong not to throw them through a few benchmarks.

All game tests here are run at "High" settings apart from Crysis which was run at "Mainstream"; DX9 mode was used for all tests apart from HAWX; and no anti-aliasing or high levels of anisotropic filtering were used.

Test Setup.
CPU: Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3600MHz
RAM: 2x2GB G.Skill DDR2-1000 CL5
Mobo: Asus P5Q Pro
O/S: Vista Home Premium 64bit SP2
Drivers: Nvidia WHQL 186.18

All games tested here played very well, proving that these cards can run modern 3D titles with little fuss, even though the quality settings weren't exactly maxed out. Most games are very smooth and playable when you average 40 frames per second and above, and some titles like Crysis are fine even in the mid-30's. Across the board the 9800GT averages about 20% better performance than the weaker 9600GT.

Conclusion.

The one thing that pestered me throughout testing was the noise coming from the cards. To be fair, they're not loud by many standards, but for what are now lower-end GPU - especially "Green Edition" ones - I would have hoped for a more subtle cooling solution. Anyone planning on plonking one of these into a Home Theatre PC better not be too concerned about noise levels. You can manually turn the fan speeds down to achieve near-silence, but I wouldn't recommend extended periods of gaming doing this due to risk of overheating the cards.

Aside from noise, there's very little to complain about. Despite being clocked slightly lower than standard 9600GT and 9800GT cards they are still perfectely adequate for gaming. Considering that there is not a lot of options in the segment of low power gaming graphics cards, these should be near the top of your shopping list if Green is what you need.

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Our thanks to PlayTech for providing the review samples.