Cooling
Gainward BLISS 9600 GT PCX Golden Sample 1024MB
Gainward BLISS 9600 GT PCX Golden Sample 512MB |
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Engineers from this company traditionally equip their cards with bulky devices consisting of a large aluminum heat sink, quite a big fan in the center, and "tent frame" housing. The latter does not seem efficient to me. This design might have been more compact. Otherwise, it's a wide cooler as long as the card and potential problems with physical incompatibility with some motherboards. And don't forget that it's a two-slot cooler, that is the second slot after the graphics card will be blocked.
This cooler is very efficient. It's quiet, and it copes with its task very well.
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| Forsa GeForce 9600 GT 512MB (New edition) |
As I have already mentioned above, from now on all cards of this series will come with this design and this cooler. The cooling system consists of a massive heat sink installed in the middle of the card over the graphics core. Unlike the previous case, memory chips are not cooled. The fins are made of thin aluminum, and they bend easily. So a special plastic housing is installed on the heat sink in transit.
Even though the cooler takes up two slots (as in the previous case), it demonstrates high efficiency and low noise.
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We monitored temperatures using RivaTuner (written by A.Nikolaychuk AKA Unwinder). Here are the results (as both cards are copies of the reference design operating at the same frequencies, we'll publish common results):
Forsa GeForce 9600 GT 512MB (New edition)
Gainward BLISS 9600 GT PCX Golden Sample 1024MB, Gainward BLISS 9600 GT PCX Golden Sample 512MB
Both cooling systems proved their high efficiency. The core temperature stayed below 60°C even after a one-hour series of heavy tests. Forsa card demonstrated even better results - below 55°C.
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