I concur wholeheartedly. Not everyone needs an 8800 GTX or Radeon HD 4870 to game contently. I'm of the train of thought that this generation has become rather spoiled (with no offense) because everything has to be at 1920x1200+ with 4x FSAA and at 50-60+FPS (bar Crysis).... or it's the end of the world?
A 9500 GT will play UT3 and Call of Duty 4 fine at 1280x1024 w/16x AF and everything else enabled save FSAA. Even Bioshock can look well enough and be played at decent frame-rates on this card. The games do not look lamentable at those settings. They do not look as stunning as the greatest of visuals would, but they do not look bad. To top that off, the 9500 GT has 80% of the 8600 GTS' memory bandwidth, and yet even at complete stock speeds is basically on equal footing. Oh, and let's not forget pixel and texel fill rates: over a 20% disadvantage, yet with 25 million more transistors (being one of the advantages of the 9500 GT, but not a sterling one). Greater archiecture obviously yields its benefits here, and the 9500 GT can pump 44,800 shader operations a second - the 8600 GTS does 46,400 by contrast. While I'm not saying raw power is paltry. It certainly isn't and any 8600/9500 board will show its fatal drawback when you turn on FSAA, especially at higher resolutions... or, rather, just play games that opt for traditional pixel and texture ops rather than shader architecture, and games like that only put the 8600 GTS on par with a rather old 7800 GT and not ahead of even a 7600 GT by that great a length... it also brings half the performance of a 7900 GTX/X1950 XTX. That's what you sacrifice with a 128-bits wide memory bus, reduced ROPs, and other things. It will be intriguing to see the day when 256-bit boards finally make their way to the low-end.
I'm just saying that these spree of games in this generation benefit a great deal from new architecture as we've seen for well over a year now. As for being on equal footing with the 7900 GTX... the 8600 GTS may be able to go toe to toe with it (as can a 9500 GT, and even a 8600 GT isn't far behind) in today's games, it still can't touch a X1950 XTX. Notice how well a X1950 XTX still does in today's games, easily surpassing a 7900 GTX? That's a good number of pixel rendering pipelines and raw power for you, as the X1950 XTX has 64GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is still more than a lot of mid-end boards today. Two years later, a X1950 XTX is still not that weak a board.
The R300 generation called to a similar nature: a Radeon 9700 Pro was still able to run games decently two years after its release. As such, nVidia's 8800 GTX has followed a similar skeleton: these boards are made for long term use, and I see that as a great thing. By this I'm not saying that a GTX 280 or Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be ruled out two years later (but who knows?), just that I'm quite impressed by what nVidia and ATi have been able to assure with their hardware.
But I digress. I'm getting off-topic. I think the 9500 GT is a great board for the price, noticeably better than a 8600 GT with hardware specs that are not too significantly better. It has great overclocking capacity as well, though I feel people should recollect that not everyone is an overclocker. It's no 8800 GT or HD 4850, but for a "casual" and "less hardcore" gamer (as it's deemed so today) it's just dandy.
should be good in what HTPC? or just as a newer 8600GTS
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