i am interested in purchasing the Nvidia 9600GT 512mb card, i look for this on google there are all sorts of brands with all sorts of prices. brands such as asus, msi, albatron, XFX make them. i thought nVidia was the only one to make nvidia cards. or nvidia makes the gpu but rest body is made by different brands? whats the story guys. please explain noob.
Hi, I understand your confusion. Nvidia makes the base chip and sells it to various companies: evga, bfg, etc. They often do something to it, such as overclock it, or change the colors, whatever. Then they sell it as the EVGA Nvidia 9600GT Overclocked (or whatever they want to call it). The base design is the same, just different companies doing different stuff to it. Hope this clears up the confusion.
Of course, Nvidia sells some chips as well, but they're usually far too stock, so you'll certainly want to pick one of the firms you named. As for which firm to pick, I'd suggest XFX as I have had only good experience with them and they do provide good chips. But best thing is to dig into the tech side of everything and compare all the specs - core MHz, Memory MHz, memory type, memory bandwidth and so on ... - then you can see which has the best price/performance ratio.
