8 - 9600 GT ECS OC edition (1)

ECS GeForce 9600 GT 512MB OC

The last product we reviewed from ECS surprised us, and they are doing it again. ECS will deliver a reference based, yet customized GeForce 9600 GT to the market. The card has been fitted with a passive cooler, and until I popped it into the test-system I had no clue that it came pre-overclocked as well.

Now in short, the little critter (well little ...)  comes pre-overclocked and has passive cooling thanks to an Arctic Accelero S2 cooler ... passive! And as our review will show you the temperatures don't even suck. For an original OEM manufacturer it's nice to see something else than a 100% reference based product. The GPU core is clocked at 680 MHz, the memory at an effective 1850 MHz. Shaders are clocked at 1728 MHz.

At first glance you'll get a little scared though as the cooler as supplied by Arctic cooling is just massive. The interesting part here is that if you have a normal ventilated PC with acceptable airflow you can go passive, without any fans and thus no noise levels and I just love that. Such a big sized VGA card does come with couple of quirks though. The heatsink is a giant. You are looking at a dual-slot cooler. There's another negative though; if you where planning SLI (two cards bridged) then forget abut it as the Arctic S2 heatsink will block the SLI finger.

Underneath that big cooler we spot a very reference like PCB, but nicely blue colored. Stated in many of my reviews already, I like details and if you look at the photo shoot on the next pages you'll even notice that the RAM chips have been equipped with little RAM heatsinks.

ECS is offering you a two year warranty with this graphics card. And at this price-level it's okay, speaking of price level ... the custom cooler will make it slightly more expensive - expect 169 EUR / 199 USD for this model and that's including VAT; not bad, eh?

It's diversity like shown on this product I can really appreciate. Despite the aesthetics, ECS also pre-overclocked the card a little, shifting it a notch up compared to the NVIDIA reference specifications.

Let's have a peek in the photo-shoot.

Packaging and box contents; included in the box you'll find:

• ECS GeForce 9600 GT 512 MB w/ passive Arctic S2 cooler
• Driver CD
• HDTV block (3-way RCA component)
• 6-pin to Molex power cable x1
• manual / quick install guide
• VGA->DVI dongle
• DVI->HDMI adapter

It's good to see ECS including a HDMI adapter cable by the way.

The card itself has a pretty nice design. I like the small intricacies to be found in different color PCB (Blue), non-standard cooling and the little RAM sinks. BTW please do remove that sticker ;)