Gigabyte GV-NX96T512HP  (Geforce 9600GT) Manufacturer Gigabyte Category Graphics Card GPU Nvidia Geforce 9600GT (G94) Custom Heatpipe Cooling Ram 512Mb DDR3 Editor Winston Chim Share    digg this! "I have to say ... the Gigabyte GV-NX96T512HP is probably one of my favourites. I particularly like the in-house designed heatpipe cooler, which offers total silence and works great in cooling the card. "

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Gigabyte offers mainstream users a completely silent Geforce 9600GT ... It's perfect for any HTPC system

INTRODUCTION 

This brings us to Gigabyte's Thermal Division. Since early 2004, they've managed to establish themselves as a real contender against the big boys, such as Thermaltake, Coolermaster and Zalman. And over the past six months, they've been expanding their products to include a wide range CPU and VGA coolers, chassis and even power supplies. Now, if you take a look at some of their graphics cards ... you'll notice that on a few of them, Gigabyte have included a pre-installed VGA cooler from manufacturers such as Zalman. This is a great idea, as it adds value to the product and reduces GPU temperatures with less noise.

It now seems that Gigabyte have a fair bit of knowledge in producing thermal products. So, this year they've decided to invest a little bit more in their in-house R&D team for producing some new thermal solutions. Silent CPU and VGA coolers seem to be their main focus ... and we will be seeing a lot of fanless, heatpipe coolers from Gigabyte this year. In this review, we get to see their new heatpipe cooler, which features the new innovative "Multi-Core Cooling Technology". It's an all new concept in VGA cooling, delivering outstanding pure-slient thermal performance. According to Gigabyte, it can deliver thermal efficiency of upto 76%. Here are the three main features.

 - Multi-point cooling with copper nodes
 - Ultra-thin layered fins with high performance heatpipes
 - Advanced natural convection design

In this review, we'll be taking a look at the Gigabyte GV-NX96T512HP graphics card. The card utilises an overclocked Nvidia Geforce 9600GT (G94) GPU, which runs at 720Mhz, and features 512Mb of DDR3 ram which is also overclocked @ 2Ghz (2 x 1000Mhz). An overclocked GPU and memory can produce a lot of excess heat. Gigabyte combats this by fitting its own in-house designed heatpipe cooler. This cooler looks very impressive, it's totally silent with no fans, and features 4 copper heatpipes with two large arrays of aluminum fins for maximum heat dissipation. One of the aluminum arrays sits directly over the GPU, while the other protrudes out through one of the backplates.

 

There's no denying, fanless graphic cards that offers good gaming performance have always been one of the most difficult products to find. Most fanless cards are designed for the mainstream user and the HTPC market, where goood gaming performance is not one of the main necessities. So, it was a real surprise to see that Gigabyte managed to released the GV-NX96T512HP graphics card. A graphics card that is totally silent, offering decent gaming performance. I wonder how well a fanless cooler would really work ... I'm a little skeptical, but I'm sure Gigabyte will prove me wrong. 

For our tests, we'll be benchmarking the Gigabyte GV-NX96T512HP (Geforce 9600GT) with several GPU intensive DX10 games ... with both 4xAA and 16xAF options enabled, as well as your usual 3DMark 2005 and 2006 tests. Our test rig comprises of an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ default 2.4Ghz, Gigabyte GA-P35 DS4 motherboard, Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-800 4Gb Kit, PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 860W PSU and a 19" Dell Ultrascan P990 monitor. All-in-all, it's a decently spec'd system for DX10 gaming.

OK, lets not waste any more time and see how well the Gigabyte GV-NX96T512HP (Geforce 9600GT) will perform against similar cards on the market.