ASUS EN9600GT TOP Video Card Review

Introduction

The 9600 GT is the darling of the gaming world with its lower power consumption, stellar performance, and ease on the wallet. What happens when the worlds leading enthusiast motherboard supplier rolls up its sleeves and gets a little dirty with NVIDIAs price/performance leader? You get the ASUS 9600 GT TOP, an overclocked and beyond the limit of ordinary video card. One glance at the huge heat sink on this card and you know that Asus is serious about its performance. While it does look like something that would be found on a CPU, this beast keeps the G94 core of the 9600 GT nice and cool.

Beyond the heat sink we see that Asus has gone a different route with the color of the PCB, it is a nice bluish-green that sets itself apart from lesser 9600 GT brethren. Further differentiating the card from a reference model is the core and memory speed. Coming in with a 70 MHz bump in core speed to 720 MHz, the Asus 9600 GT can walk the walk.

Although there isnt a change in memory speed from the reference card, the 9600 GT benefits the most from the Core and Shader speed increases. The memory on our card is Samsung K4J52324QE-BJ1A 1000MHz rated GDDR3, so if youre into overclocking you should easily be able to get an extra 100MHz since they are clocked at 900MHz.

The video connectors are the standard twin Dual-Link DVI cables with an S-Video style out that can be used with included adaptors to hook it up to an HDTV. Lets take a look at the box and bundle to see what other connections are available. Yes, the DVI connector on the left is Yellow!