We had the chance to see Gigabyte's passively cooled 9600GT GV-NX96T512HP in action.



The card is equipped with a passive dual slot cooler large enough to keep the G94 GPU temperatures at bay. It comes with 512MB of reference clocked GDDR3 memory and the core is also reference clocked. Multi Core Cooling sounds great if you're in the PR business, but it's just a better cooling design. The temperature is dissipated on several key points on the cooler and that's about it.



Part of the heatsink protrudes from the card's bracket which should also help provide better, unhindered airflow. The cooler base is connected to the fins by two copper heatpipes, while another two heatpipes conduct heat to a secondary heatsink. Gigabyte uses high quality power components on this card (Ultra Durable 2) and the same goes for most Graphics cards coming out of Gigabyte these days.

The pinhead fan connector is still there, but you won't be needing it. Just above the SLI connector you'll find another white pinhead connector used for audio input. This will come in handy if you want to enjoy HD video with sound. This card supports HDTV via a dongle. It has two dual-link DVI connectors as well as the good old d-Sub.