12 - The Conclusion

The Verdict

Galaxy's GeForce 9600 GT 512MB Silent heatpipe graphics card is once again a fine product to own. I like the somewhat customized design and I definitely am charmed by the cooler. Even on a hot day, it performed good enough in our test-environment. You however will need decent airflow inside that PC of yours to get that residual heat from the innards of your PC and you need to remember that the cooler is pretty bulky. Bulky or not, it will only eat up one slot, as the big heatink was placed on the rear-side of the card, in some cases at that position a x1 PCIe slot is located but not really a big deal. Pretty clever really, it has Galaxy written all over it as they really do think about these things.

The card will cost you roughly 100-125 EUR. Unfortunately for NVIDIA as a whole, the Radeon HD 4850 can be purchased for just under 150 EUR already and that card just wipes the floor with the GeForce 9600 GT. This is the reality that AMD has created with the absurdly nice 4850/4870 lineup. That product however does get hot and makes more noise, but gaming wise it's the way to go. Throw in 20 bucks more and you can pick up the GeForce 9800 GTX + which is also stunning for the money with much better cooling and overall performance opposed to the 9600 GT.

The bottom line is this, for the ones that occasionally play a game at 1024x768 / 1280x1024 this card will offer decent performance. But more interesting is the card for HTPC's and desktop PC's that require a silent environment. So pretty much it boils down to what you actually plan to do with the graphics card. If you hunt gaming performance, please go with a GeForce 9800 GTX+ or Radeon HD 4850. But if it is sheer silence you need while playing an occasional game then this card will definitely come very recommended.

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