With games getting more and more demanding, the amount of frame buffer available to the GPU has been on a continuous rise. However, as we saw in the ASUS 8800GT-1GB article, it doesn’t always help to equip your VGA card with more RAM than the reference design of a manufacturer. Today, we see MSI going down that road with their 1GB version of the 9600GT graphics card. Unlike ASUS, besides adding more memory, MSI has also added more speed to the card by overclocking it to 675MHz and outfitted it with a custom heatsink. Does it get the job done? We’ll find that out today.

Features

• Graphics Bus Technology: PCI Express 2.0
• Core clock: 675MHz
• Memory Amount: 1GB
• Memory clock: 900Mhz
• Memory Interface: 256-bit
• Shader clock: 1650Mhz
• Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec): 57.6
• RAMDACs (MHz): 400

Packaging

The N9600GT comes in a reasonably sized black box that provides all the details. Inside, you will find a manual, driver CD, audio cable, DVI and HDMI converters, Video cables and 4pin to 6pin power cable. Unfortunately no game is included.

Card Layout

The red-hot PCB based N9600GT has anything but a reference cooling design. The custom heatsink has an 80mm fan in the middle hidden inside a red plastic cover. The cover is lifted from the rear side to allow access to the power connector and looking from here, you can get a peak at the heatsink as well.

Looking at the top side of the cover, you can see the huge heatsink which almost covers the entire card. You can also see two heatpipes for better heat transfer. MSI decided not to cover the RAM chips with their custom heatsink which is a shame as that might have helped overclock the RAM better.

On the front side of the card, there is a blue colored DVI output that supports HDMI outputs using the HDMI converter and a Video output on a side, notice that the card takes two PCI slots because of the heatsink.