1 - Introduction
iChill GeForce 9600 GT ZEROtherm Hurricane
Info: Inno3D
SKU: SKU C9600GT92-H5GTCD
Price: 199 USD
One of the best bang for buck graphics cards at this very moment has to be the GeForce 9600 GT. This is essentially the reason why you spot so many reviews on them. They sell like hot buns from the oven man. They offer you an excellent gaming experience for not a lot of money. One petit issue though is that when you compare brands these cards are pretty much all the same. Same PCB (that green thingy with the chips on it) and same cooler. There's some variety in clock speeds but hardware wise that's pretty much it.
Luckily there are some NVIDIA board partners who try to do things differently & Inno3D is one of them. Actually I think Inno3D has five or six different SKUs based on the GeForce 9600 GT, but one stands out. It's their GeForce 9600 GT iChill edition graphics card with ZeroTherm HC92 cooler.
Inno3D's iChill series basically boils down towards a better software bundle, better cooling, a decent overclock and an okay price. Within the Inno3D "iChill" range of products however, there are several product lines with different cooling options. Some cards have Zalman cooling, the others have Arctic Cooling products cooling the cards. Today's model has a cooler with active fan that originates from ZeroTherm, the guys that make these weird butterfly looking coolers as well. Good stuff.
Today's product goes a little further, likely in an attempt to save on the build price. This actually is a do it yourself kit. That meaning once you open up the box, you'll need to mount the cooler on the card. Weird for sure, but a pretty easy task (we'll talk you through it).
Next to that this product is clocked slightly higher than usual. See a regular GeForce 9600 GT has a core frequency of 650 MHz, its shader processors at 1650 MHz and the memory 1625 MHz. This iChill version is actually clocked standard at a 720 MHz core, 1600 MHz shader clock (weird yes) and the memory at 1944.000MHz effective.
All in all pretty interesting changes and definitely worth our time for further investigation.
With that being said, let's startup this review where we explain the technical details and test the card, Guru style. Benchmarks games include S.t.a.l.k.e.r, F.e.a.r., Crysis, Frontlines: Fuel of war and the one game you'll even get for free with this product, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2.
Um guys .. what are you staring at ? Next page please.
