A Closer Look

The cooler is the average VGA cooling assembly using a Copper baseplate and an array of fins made from Aluminum. The card does not exhaust hot air outside of the case, but this is not a big problem with the fairly low heat output of the card.


This card is compatible with SLI and can be paired with any other 9600 GT card. When you are using an Amp! Edition card and a reference card, both cards will clock down to the lowest common denominator. Above picture also shows where you connect the SPDIF audio input from the motherboard for use with HDMI+Audio.


The power connector on the back is required to supply power to the card. It is also required when running in PCI-E 2.0 mode, which would be able to supply all power over the bus.


The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4J52324QE-BJ1A. Even though they have 1.0 ns latency (= 1000 MHz) we saw a stable memory overclock of close to 1100 MHz.


This is NVIDIA's new G94 GPU, the markings "0802" indicate production date of week 2 in 2008 which shows that NVIDIA has been producing and stockpiling these chips for a while. G94 is made at TSMC in a 65 nm process with 505 million transistors.