Palit is one of the many NVIDIA and ATI partners most Americans haven't heard of that makes a full line of GeForce and Radeon video cards. We do remember seeing Palit's cards at the online retailers, but we really didn't pay much attention, being more interested in the brands that we are all more familiar with. Today we will be looking at the Palit GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Sonic edition. The GeForce 9600 GT is NVIDIA's latest mid-range graphics card, and rather than the reference 512GB of GDDR3 memory, Palit has opted to add a full gigabyte of memory, along with a heatpipe cooler, to this card. How will it stand up against the last generation of mid-range cards? - ThinkComputers

Palit GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Sonic Video Card Review

The GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Sonic comes in a very colorful box, which is mostly holographic gold in color. None of the photos do the box justice, it is really sharp looking. The front of the box mentions some of the features, the rear of the box has a small blurb of the features, in a full dozen languages. The content is protected inside by layers of cardboard. The video card itself is in a separate cardboard box covered in bubblewrap, and with a slab of foam between the bubblewrap and the box. The Palit GeForce 9600 GT Sonic edition is a sharp looking card, completely covered with a plastic fan shroud, orange in color.

Though not advertised as such, the Palit GeForce 9600 GT Sonic is factory overclocked, the stock clocks for a GeForce 9600 GT are 650/1800MHz, the Palit is clocked at 700/2000MHz. Remove the shroud and we see that Palit has utilized a rather large twin heatpipe cooling solution. The aluminum cooler does add considerable weight to the card, but it is in no way heavy. Looking at that PCI expansion bracket, we see that the rear of the Palit GeForce 9600 GT Sonic is not your typical reference version. Besides a small vent for exhausting some of the cooling air out of the rear of the case, and the atypical twin DVI ports.

The Palit GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Sonic edition is definitely a card for the future. Upcoming games may very well appreciate the full gigabyte of memory. The HDMI ready cards are just coming around, and the GeForce 9600 GT Sonic is prepared for your LCD TV or home theater. Monitors with DisplayPort interface are beginning to surface, and once again, the Palit GeForce 9600 GT is ready for them. The heatpipe cooler works well, keeping the factory overclocked GPU to under 50°C at load, with total silence. We found no faults with the GeForce 9600 GT Sonic unless some lack of instructions for the features of this graphics card.

We can say that if something like that is the only thing you can find wrong with a product, the manufacturer has done a darn good job. The Palit GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Sonic sells for around $199 at a popular online retailer, which puts it among the most expensive GeForce 9600 GT's. But with the full gigabyte of memory, heatpipe cooler, factory overclocking and multiple interfaces, we'd expect it to be more expensive than other standard GeForce 9600 GT graphics cards.