So as the purchase price will show, these cards can be pretty cheap. The product as tested today is passively cooled, comes with a customized blue PCB and some pretty good value at a 99 EUR price tag. See for roughly the price of the regular GeForce 9600 GT you can buy this passive edition already, and that is pretty good. What's the tradeoff you ask ? Well most 9600 GT cards are often overclocked and come in at the same price. Sparkle will set the core frequency at default reference speeds for you. With passive cooling, which will run much warmer; it's the wise thing to do. So the clock frequencies where similar to reference, 650 MHz on the core, 1600 MHz on the Shader processors and 900 MHz on the memory (1800 effective).

It's all about the cooler, other than this you can expect a reference based graphics card with dual-slot design. Packaging and box contents; included in the box you'll find:

• GeForce 9600 GT 512 MB passively cooled
• Driver CD
• HDTV block (3-way RCA component)
• SVideo cable
• 6-pin to Molex power cable
• manual / quick install guide
• VGA->DVI dongle

Lacking is a HDMI converter which in this era is a no-go in my eyes. Also there is no additional software to be found. You receive the basics, but do get that passive cooler at a great price.

Setting up the PC

Installing the card into your system will be a pretty easy job. Just slide the card into a free PCIe slot, connect one 6-pin connector to the card. I do recommend you to just buy a decent stable PSU with some reserves, always.

Once the card is installed we startup windows. We installed our driver, rebooted and that was it. The card will work straight out of the box. Just the way we like it.