NVIDIA sought to give the GeForce 9600 GT a refresh with a new SKU, the 9600 GT Green Edition, that makes use of the reduced thermal footprints of the 55 nm G94 graphics core, and slightly reduced clock speeds, to result in energy-efficient graphics cards. Some of these do not require the 6-pin PCI-E power input. Gigabyte has its first accelerator based on this core, the GV-N96TSL-1GI. The company goes a step ahead in exploiting the thermal characteristics of the core, to come up with a silent-cooler design.

The cooler which Gigabyte refers to as "Silent Cell", consists of a central GPU contact block from which heatpipes emerge, conveying heat to an aluminum fin array that spans across the full length of the card. A part of it even protrudes out of the back-plate. The cooler relies on convectional currents of the air inside the case to draw heat from the fins, and leave the case through the backplate. Cooling aside, Gigabyte got generous with the amount of memory: 1 GB of GDDR3 across a 256-bit wide bus. Perhaps it compensates for the slightly reduced clock speeds, the extant to which, isn't known as of now. The card will hit shelves shortly, by when we could tell its price.