Although Nvidia's first mid-range graphic card in the GeForce 9-series, the 9600 GT, isn't expected to hit retail shelves until February, a couple of early specs and benchmarks have already tricked out for the entire world to see thanks to hardware sites Expreview and PConline (in Chinese).
Judging by the pictures, the 9600 GT has a cooler similar to that of the existing GeForce 8800 GT, and requires an external power connector. The card they've got is running at 650MHz core, 1625MHz shader and 1800MHz memory, and featuring 64 stream processors, 512MB of RAM, and a 256-bit memory bus.
Performance-wise, the 9600 GT comes out roughly on a par with the 8800 GS and delivers about 83% of the performance of the 8800 GT in 3DMark06 - so this card seems to be an 8600 replacement more than anything else. Expreview didn't run any other tests, but PConline also included titles such as Crysis, Bioshock, UT3, Company of Heroes, plus five other games in its tests.