On the 21st of February 2008 we took our first look at the GeForce 9600 GT. It has a reference design of 650MHz GPU frequency, 1.625GHz shader frequency, and 512MB of GDDR3 at 1.8GHz memory on a 256-bit memory bus. One of our final thoughts in that evaluation was if we could find it for under $169 what a great value it would be. Soon after that article, our wish came true and the GeForce 9600 GT had become great video card for those with a budget.

Step forward to today with the recent releases of NVIDIA’s and AMD’s next generation GPUs and we see new competitors for the 9600 GT. The Radeon HD 4850, for as low $165 after mail rebate, has proven to be quite a performer. In fact, it has even brought NVIDIA to reduce its prices and bring the GeForce 9800 GTX down to $200. With this new race in the budget minded category, we wondered where does this leave cards like the BFGTech GeForce 9600 GT OCX at $150 after mail in rebate?