Video Cards:
There aren’t many 3rd party video cards for the 9600. The ATI Radeon 9200 is the most powerful one you can get for a 9600, but the Radeon 7000 series cards also work well. The card that the 9600 ships with is the 8MB ixMicro TwinTurbo card that uses the oldschool Apple Monitor Interface DB15 connector:
You won’t be fooling with any DVI stuff on a 9600, at least with the stock 9600 card. Seeing that I’ve got two 1080p widescreen DVI/VGA monitors, I needed a couple Apple DB15 to VGA adapters. I got mine from a random online store and they work fine, but be aware that some are higher quality than others, and that some also include jumpers on them while others don’t. Mine didn’t happen to have jumpers on them, so take a look at the manufacturer’s provided documentation to make sure you have the jumpers set right. Otherwise, you’ll either lose quality, or you’ll lose color in your video.
The ixMicro TwinTurbo cards are pretty underpowered. They give you a bunch of different 4:3 display aspect ratio resolutions, with the highest one being 1600X1200. Unfortunately no 16:9 widescreen DAR resolution is provided. It just wasn’t around back then. I’m unsure if the Radeon cards provide any 16:9 DARs or not, or which kind of connectors they use, but if they do provide any 16:9 DARs, you'd be better off using those instead of the stock ixMicro TwinTurbo cards.
There IS in fact a way to get the Twin Turbo cards rocking some 16:9 flavor in your monitors, but it can’t be done without some serious hacks. The way I got mine running at 16:9 DARs was by paying someone to hack them for me. This involved having to physically mail the cards to the hacker. The problem with distributing my own personal hacked drivers is that they’re completely custom, and they’re coded precisely for my own needs and my own hardware. The Twin Turbo cards have different models, different revisions, different EPROMs, and possibly different stock drivers, so consequently there’s different code to fool with too. If you add on top the fact that I’m running at a slightly abnormal 1280X720 resolution, I think you can see that it most likely wouldn’t be compatible with your personal 9600 rig.
It’s best to use a Radeon to get where you’re going.
There aren’t many 3rd party video cards for the 9600. The ATI Radeon 9200 is the most powerful one you can get for a 9600, but the Radeon 7000 series cards also work well. The card that the 9600 ships with is the 8MB ixMicro TwinTurbo card that uses the oldschool Apple Monitor Interface DB15 connector:
You won’t be fooling with any DVI stuff on a 9600, at least with the stock 9600 card. Seeing that I’ve got two 1080p widescreen DVI/VGA monitors, I needed a couple Apple DB15 to VGA adapters. I got mine from a random online store and they work fine, but be aware that some are higher quality than others, and that some also include jumpers on them while others don’t. Mine didn’t happen to have jumpers on them, so take a look at the manufacturer’s provided documentation to make sure you have the jumpers set right. Otherwise, you’ll either lose quality, or you’ll lose color in your video.
The ixMicro TwinTurbo cards are pretty underpowered. They give you a bunch of different 4:3 display aspect ratio resolutions, with the highest one being 1600X1200. Unfortunately no 16:9 widescreen DAR resolution is provided. It just wasn’t around back then. I’m unsure if the Radeon cards provide any 16:9 DARs or not, or which kind of connectors they use, but if they do provide any 16:9 DARs, you'd be better off using those instead of the stock ixMicro TwinTurbo cards.
There IS in fact a way to get the Twin Turbo cards rocking some 16:9 flavor in your monitors, but it can’t be done without some serious hacks. The way I got mine running at 16:9 DARs was by paying someone to hack them for me. This involved having to physically mail the cards to the hacker. The problem with distributing my own personal hacked drivers is that they’re completely custom, and they’re coded precisely for my own needs and my own hardware. The Twin Turbo cards have different models, different revisions, different EPROMs, and possibly different stock drivers, so consequently there’s different code to fool with too. If you add on top the fact that I’m running at a slightly abnormal 1280X720 resolution, I think you can see that it most likely wouldn’t be compatible with your personal 9600 rig.
It’s best to use a Radeon to get where you’re going.