Well it's finally here, the GeForce 9 series of GPU's has hit the shelves and the articles related have already poured in thick and fast. We know we're a little behind everyone else on this one, but our GeForce 9600 GT view is a bit different. VVikoo's monstrous GeForce 9600 GT comes with a whopping Zalman heatsink and some hefty factory overclocking. Once again VVikoo has gone out of the ordinary and has gone for something more special and applied their own touch to the GeForce 9600 GT video card. By applying a different cooling solution their card should be a bit better than the more standard versions you can find from other manufacturers, which sets them apart from the competition. - XSReviews

VVikoo GeForce 9600 GT 512MB Video Board Review

There arn't any real differences between the G94 chip used in the new GeForce 9600 GT cards and the G92 chip used in the GeForce 8800 GT and GTS refresh. It still supports the known unified shader achitecture, NVIDIA's own Quantum physics engine and PureVideo. It's still the same 65nm die size but it does tend to be clocked slightly higher than most G92 chips when at stock. There are a couple of things that the GeForce 9600 has over the GeForce 8600 though, it doubles the stream processors to 64 shaders, and also doubles the bus width from 128-bit to 256-bit wide memory interface for extra processing power.

The colorful GeForce 9600 GT box is quite typical of most GPU manufacturers, funky, grungey colouring and a half naked chick. Fortunately, VVikoo have done this relatively tastefully and while having an attractive CGI model, they have her half in shadow which makes a nice change. The front also have several feature buttons and a stickers letting you know that inside you have a free copy of Tomb Raider: Anniversary. It's hardly a new game, but still pretty good looking by today's standards. The back of the box is the typical setup, a smaller version of the front box art, specifications and a few key features explained in more detail.

The GeForce 9600 GT looks quite similar to the GeForce 8800 GT from VVikoo that came out with a month or two ago as it features the same Zalman Z-Machine GV1000 cooler. This version though, is in copper. This thing is pretty big, with the large copper fins stretching across almost the whole card. The fan in it's centre is the standard Zalman, it's 80mm and has translucent frosted blades. However this one has a VVikoo branded sticker in it's centre. The entire cooler is copper based, and that means lots of copper fins. They're ridged along the top, and wrap right around the heatpipes to maximize contact with them.

Overclocking the GeForce 9600 GT board wasn't too difficult, but the process had it's problems. Both RivaTuner and ATITool weren't fans of this card, so we had to use nTune's performance settings to up the frequencies. Making sure we had the fan spinning at full capacity, we started to move the card from it's factory overclock of 700/2000MHz and managed to go all the way up to 900/2200MHz. Unfortunately, this was horrendously unstable and would crash 3DMark06 within seconds. A more realistic clock for the VVikoo was achieved at 850MHz on the core and 2100MHz on the memory, which is a nice though limited overclock.

Well NVIDIA have done a good job with the GeForce 9600 GT, and VVikoo have done a good one with their version of it. This card is near the performance of a GeForce 8800 GT, it overclocks well and has an excellent cooler. The game bundle isn't bad either, and there's a host of cables to keep any techie occupied for an afternoon finding out what their new card can do. The GeForce 9600 GT really is a good card, but nothing is perfect and we wish VVikoo has used a funky coloured PCB like they had with their GeForce 8800 GT, it just makes it stand out from the crowd. If you need a new GPU, this ain't a bad shout.