MSI N9600GT-OC T2D512 review

Since its unveiling, NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT reaped laurels amongst the mid class videocards. Understandable, companies manufacturing such hardware rushed to push out wit a myriad variations based on 9600GT's chip - G94. MSI, leaders in the field had presented 6 different cards (some of them with 2 variations each) and in this review we'll be playing with one of the most interesting ones - MSI N9600GT-OC T2D512, distinguished from the rest with non-referent cooling and factory overclock...

Let's start with what makes MSI N9600GT-OC more special than all the other cards. First, the card is with raised frequencies. While the referent NVIDIA model is operating at 650/1625/1800MHz core/shaders/memory respectively, the particular MSI offspring works at 700MHz/1750MHz/1900MHz. Nothing special, not compared to what we saw in our 9600 GT 512MB earlier, these cards easily get to even higher frequencies, such overclock can be done on any GeForce 9600 GT easily and safely. But on the other hand this overclocked card can outperform every other referent one.

The second interesting thing about N9600GT-OC is it's cooler. The referent NVIDIA is a mere piece of aluminum with a small fan, occupying a single slot. With it, especially in more "stuffy" cases and under a load, the card does tend to get noisy - the small fan just couldn't cope with the amount of radiated heat and slowly raises it's RPM until at 100% we get a whistling symphony (a nasty one at that). But MSI, thanks to their collaboration with Zalman, had begun to pay more and more attention to their coolers, in the case of N9600GT-OC T2D512 we a witnessing a big two slot cooler with heatpipes. True, aluminum again, but with extremely well placed grills, providing a big cooling surface. The fan is bigger too, thus pushing much more air at lower RPM, thus remaining cooler and efficient all the time.

The card we're reviewing is the upper on the picture above

So things are beginning to take shape now and on top of it all this MSI N9600GT-OC T2D512 could be bought for a little under 320 leva (~160 Euro) or in other words a tad more expensive than other brand names that come with referent coolers and no overclock! Ah, but let's look inside its box now...