I wanna job in the Nvidia marketing department. I wonder if the crack is free, or deducted from your salary?

At least it's a mostly forgettable product this time, unlike the G80 vs G92 8800*'s of yesteryear. I failed to prevent a friend from buying a 640MB 8800 just a few months ago. The people who want an 9600 GSO don't care, anyway. Rename it the nvidia IDK$80.

Just to add to the pile of complaints, I"ll add that It's not just making an original purchase more complicated, it's also hurting ebay resales, because it's already hard enough to be sure you're getting what is advertised. What are the odds that the seller is going to specify memory or G92 vs G94, and that it will actually be correct, and that he'll take it back if it's wrong? Do you even want to bother, with so many "if"s? . . . Only if you didn't care in the first place (see above).

A great man of the internets once said:

"If you do not understand,,,hey I do not understand."

Same product different name. That's great business ? Sounds like the financial markets!

Jesus everyone needs to chill out about this. As a consumer, all you need to do is a little research on the card you are looking at before you buy it, so you know that you are getting a product that fits your needs. The end. Who cares what it's called? If you've done your research before spending your money, as you should, you will be perfectly equipped to make a purchasing decision that won't come back to haunt you, regardless of the card's name/fab process/stream processors etc. Just be a responsible consumer and no one will get hurt.

If Nvidia wants to shoot themselves in the foot by creating a complete train-wreck of a product line up, let them. There are plenty of resources for consumers to uncover the specs/performance of any of their unfortunately named cards. If anyone is stupid enough to purchase a card just because it is named one thing or another, they deserve to get ripped off.

I think Techreport should have a counter to how many times Nvidia has rebranded or mislabeled video cards when it comes to performance.

Anyone wanna take bets on the next video card to get hit by the confusion stick?

I reserve the right to shamelessly quote my own rant from two years ago:

"The dust cloud is further polluted by a fog of letters. G, O, P, R, S, T, X, and doubtless more to come – no “GTI edition” yet, but maybe Volkswagen is inking a licensing deal. Is the HyperMegaPro GTS-XTP edition a performance king or a drama queen? Nobody knows. The letters were assembled, lottery-style, by marketing interns chained to the wall in Sublevel 17, and were never meant to give useful data. Memo to ATi and Nvidia: Normal people stare at GTO, GTX, XTX, and the like, and mostly see enough HOT, AIR to raise fabric above seventy or eighty wicker gondolas. Clean up your act or we’ll (sedatives administered, back to our regularly scheduled review –The Editors)."

http://www.lostcircuits.com/video/sapphire_x1950pro/

nVidia intern: But sir, we've run out of letters in the alphabet to name our new card with! The model numbers are getting so big we're going to have to use extra long stickers to print the name on! What do we do?
Manager: Fine, we'll start reusing old names. That way we can sell a few of the older cards to people hoping to get the newer ones! We cant lose!

*hic*

Nvidia really takes the "we reserve the right to change specifications without notice" thing seriously.

i love Nvidia. They upgrade my 8800gt to 9800gt, and then GT 150 w/o charge. :) what a company!

This is too much. Nvidia will be rightly accused of intentional deception very soon. It's gotten to the point where even informed computing enthusiasts can not be sure WTF is on a given graphics card, or what a particular GPU should be called.

So, I'll be able to go to Newegg and buy a 9600 GSO with either 256, 384, 512, or 768 MB of RAM in the next few days? This is just silly.

For once this almost makes sense, at least from a production standpoint, because now they'll have a full and a cut-down version of the G94. Unfortunately it will probably be renamed, again, along with the rest of the 9-series in short order.

I understand ATI's range of products. It's simple. Why should I bother to work out what is what in NVIDIA's world?

NVIDIA - sack your productisation guys now, seriously.

I hope some one sues this company or atleast their marketing department. This is too much.

lol they are flooding the market with garbage and confusing the batman out of consumers.

I understand how easily average users can get confused, but I'm a computer buff and have no clue whats going on here. I can tell its not just me either.

I'm not sure I even understand the purpose of releasing this card. What does it compete with?

All I'm seeing is a proliferation of video cards with a naming scheme that makes little sense to anyone.

I'm more confused than ever.

When can I start hating Nvidia?

C'mon, new name same core, now new core old name??

Until 8800GTX I had some sympathy for Nvidia, now they just make me sad.

What the hell? They are now going to sell this as a 9600gso 512?