Palit GeForce 9600 GT Sonic (9600GT Sonic)
The 9600 cooler from Palit reminds us of MSI’s model. Its 70 mm fan sits in the middle of the cooler and an orange plastic housing protects the components. However, there is only a small opening in the slot cover for warm air. Remaining space is blocked by the additional monitor connectors. Ideally, a quarter of the GPU heat is blown out of the housing, whereas the rest bounces around within the case.
Only two heat pipes are used to distribute the heat of the graphics processor to the cooler; MSI uses four. Instead, Palit thought about cooling the memory chips, the heat of which is distributed on the cover plates.
The additional cooling encouraged Palit to increase the memory speed from the 900 MHz standard to 1,000 MHz. The GPU runs at 700 MHz, whereas the reference clock is 650 MHz. In comparison to the MSI card, Palit’s shader speed is increased even higher to 1,750 MHz. The clock speeds are anchored in the BIOS of the card, and can be used with any graphics driver version.
In our test, overclocking leads to a 6% to 7% increase in overall performance compared to the reference design. If you are able to increase the shader clock rate even higher, you will gain another 2% with a 3 GHz CPU. Since the memory chips are cooled by the cover plates, you can courageously experiment with these, but don’t forget the conditions of the warranty.
The GeForce 9600 GT (G94) graphics chip supports Shader Model 4.0 and DirectX 10. Palit equips the Sonic version with 1 GB of DDR3 graphic memory, which hardly gives you any advantage when using resolutions of up to 1920x1200 pixels without anti-aliasing (AA). In Crysis with AA, the frame rate increases from 5 to 7.5 fps when the memory is doubled. In the overall results of our test suite, you can see an increase in performance of only 0.3% with the additional memory. If you want to run two GeForce 9600 GT cards in SLI mode, you should go with the 1 GB version because the larger memory has more of an effect on performance, due to the higher GPU power.
A special feature here is the large number of connectivity options. The HDMI port sits directly on the slot cover, so an adapter is not necessary. There is an internal audio connection via a SPDIF cable and Palit puts an optical audio port on the slot cover as well. You can plug your monitors into either the two DVI ports or to the new DisplayPort; there is no extra video connector for Component or S-video.
