Shortly before launching the 9600GT, Nvidia decided to sell all the 8800GT chips it had to its partners. This is what Nvidia traditionally does and with the current pricing, it is very tough to sell either of them.

The issue with the Geforce 8800GT, a card which we still consider as the best price performance ratio in computer graphics history, is that it's too closely priced to the 9600GT.

People like to buy bigger numbers, but some of them get burned when they learn that the 9600GT is actually slower than the 8800GT.

The second issue for the 8800GT is the soon-to-launch Geforce 9800 GTX, which will be a faster and more powerful version of the same chip.

As Nvidia’s job is to off load the chips onto its partners' shoulders, this becomes the partners' problem.