apologies in advance because this video is very YouTube™, but damn(!)
this exact model of 9600GT was the first graphics card I ever had. got it as a hand-me-down from a friend's dad in ~2014. sure, it was already six years old then, but it still kicked the snot out of my Core 2 Duo E4300's integrated graphics at the time. shit ran Minecraft (with Optifine) and Source Engine1 games (on medium settings) (both at 1280x1024) like a champ. Good to see that even today it's kinda sorta usable. I got a good two years out of that card, before eventually upgrading to a Core 2 Quad Q6600 and a GTX 560Ti in ~2016.
yknow. come to think of it… I could totally rebuild my first "real" PC out of scrap from work, if I wanted to. Still remember the specs; the aforementioned Core 2 Duo E4300, Geforce 9600GT, 2gb of DDR2 RAM (upgraded from 1), and a 160gb WD Blue hard disk all crammed into an old Gateway case. Probably throw Xubuntu 12.04 on it too, for the sake of period correctness. I shouldn't do this — I would probably find this entertaining for around 30 minutes, and then have another giant chunk of old crap taking up space I don't have in my apartment. but I could.
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I specify "Source Engine" because at the time those were pretty much the only modern-ish games I had any interest in. Very little has changed.
