Asus GeForce 9600 GT Silent (EN9600GT SILENT/HTDI/512M/A)
If you are installing the Asus Silent, you should put it in an area with good air flow; the big passive cooler does not protect the graphics chip from overheating. Under permanent load we measured temperatures of up to 103 °C, which can become a major problem in small enclosures or cases with poor ventilation. Without a heavy load, the cooler can easily keep the temperatures low. In 2D applications, the temperature of the graphics processor only goes up to 64 °C.
The Geforce 9600 GT (G94) supports Shader Model 4.0 and DirectX 10. Asus equipped our test sample with 512 MB of DDR3 graphics memory, which is sufficient for resolutions of up to 1920x1200 pixels. The memory chips are not cooled on both sides. So, if you don’t plan to cool the Silent with case fans, you should keep an eye on the temperature of the memory chips.
Asus’ 9600 GT runs at standard reference settings: the GPU at 650 MHz, memory at 900 MHz, and shaders at 1,625 MHz. That’s why the Asus Silent is the slowest card in our test—performance the price you pay for completely silent operation. If you can increase the clock speeds and deal effectively with the resulting temperature increase, you can gain eight percent more overall performance using a 3 GHz CPU.
The card comes with a handful of tools like SmartDoctor, which you can use to manipulate speeds and the GamerOSD (for recording and transfering game videos). If you want to use the HDMI port, you can transfer a digital SPDIF signal from the sound card to the graphics card and, thus to the HDMI adapter via an internal audio connector.
