i tried both cards and the nvidia is the better card in my eyes because when gaming you can adapter scale the image to the panel size.. the 9600 you are very limited on screen resolutions, most games you can only run 1024x768 and get the game to stretch the entire screen.... any higher resolution and your games are just a little square pic in the middle of the screen... this is an ati chipset problem and it only supports very limited resolutions...  why have a nice widescreen notebook  when you cant utilize the entire screen............

Thanks for the tips,  I must say, this is the first I've heard of the difficulty with the ATI card.  Everything I've come across thus far has praised this card on the 8600.