It's mostly been like this: This generation's performance graphics cards are next generation's midrange series. For NVIDIA, it has been like that for the NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT, 7600GT, well, and less so for the 8600GT and 8600GTS; and so to say today we'll be looking at the successor to the less than appreciated 8600 series -- the 9600GT. NVIDIA's 9600GT has been launched for more than a couple weeks now, and we've finally gotten our hands on Asus' newly modified version of the 9600GT -- the Asus EN9600GT TOP 512MB with a special cooler. As usual, the 'TOP' suffix from Asus signifies that it's overclocked (Usually pretty aggressively too) out of the box. How well will the 9600GT step up against the ATI Radeon 3870 and NVIDIA's own 8800GT? Better yet, we've even got all the fastest factory overclocked cards to test against each other in our review today. Let's get right to it and see if the 9600GT takes the midrange performance crown and how much bang you get for your buck.