The Verdict
Much like any other GeForce 9600 GT this product offers a lot of value for the money you have to pay for it. Inno3D the past year or two became more creative with their iChill edition products, and with good success. It would certainly be good to see more (r)e-tailers sell their products as there is definitely a market for gear like shown today.
Now the product as delivered today definitely is a bit weird in the sense that it actually is a DIY product, you literally have to do some work on the product, which is.. different. Don't be scared by that. It's relatively safe to do and designed in a manner that everybody can do. I'll even crank that statement up a notch; see the nice thing is it's a rewarding experience. You'll learn a thing or two about your hardware as you get a feel with it. And once you pop it into your PC, you'll notice that sheer silence and formidable cooling that the ZEROtherm cooler offers. Again a rewarding experience. As to why Inno3D opted for this DIY kit remains a question. Perhaps the reason is even as simple as cutting costs to be able to present the product a little cheaper to you, or prevent it from becoming too expensive.
Is it all good then ? Well, the product does come with two quirks though. First off although this cooler is fantastic it eats up an insane three PCI slots which is just impractical. As a result you'll have less connectivity in the PC and you definitely can forget about partnering two of these cards up in SLI. If you are cool with just a soundcard or something like that in the PC and can spare the room, it's really not an issue. But three slots is a lot.
My second negative today has to be the fact that the product is sold under the assumption that it's overclocked. And while partly true, the fact remains that the Shader processors inside the GPU are running at roughly 1600 MHz, and the Shader processors are where the extra performance is to be found. So that 720 MHz core clock increase is a little misleading, as it only effects stuff like the ROP domain. It helps but only a little. I just don't like that at at all, and it's definitely not something the competition is doing. It's like designing a Porsche and then limiting it to 100 KPh. As a result the product is performing slightly above a baseline GeForce 9600 GT, and while that is good performance, in combo with this cooler I think a shader overclock would have added a lot more value. We have shown in our overclocking session that there is a lot of headroom with overclocking, you'll just need to do it yourself.
Despite of this small error in judgment on Inno3D's behalf, this product remains one of the best 9600 GT money can buy. The sound levels are so low that it's scary, the cooling is grand, the bundle even includes GRAW2 a full game and the warranty is set at three years. There's a lot of headroom to overclock thanks to that high performance cooler and it's pretty easy to squeeze another 10% maybe 20% performance out of this product bringing it close to the GeForce 8800 GT. And that surely isn't a bad thing eh ?
The bottom line is very simple: you can purchase the Inno3D GeForce 9600 GT IChill Hurricane edition for roughly 189-199 USD including the cooler, the full version of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, and though a little higher than normal, it's worth that money for sure. But even better, you can expect prices in e-tail to be lower.
Great product. A pure unadulterated gamers product.
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