The GeForce 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 world's leading enthusiast motherboard supplier rolls up its sleeves and gets a little dirty with NVIDIA's price to performance leader? You get the ASUS GeForce 9600 GT TOP, an overclocked and beyond the limit of ordinary video card. One glance at the huge heatsink on this card and you know that ASUS is serious about its performance. While it does look like something that would be found on the CPU, this beast keeps the G94 core of the GeForce 9600 GT nice and cool, and able to run faster than reference. - Legit Reviews

ASUS Extreme N9600 GT TOP Graphics Card Review

Beyond the heatsink 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 GeForce 9600 GT brethren. Further differentiating the card from a reference model is the core and memory speed. And coming in with a 70MHz bump in core speed to 720MHz, the ASUS GeForce 9600 GT can walk the talk. Although there isn't a change in memory speed from the reference card, the GeForce 9600 GT benefits the most from the core and shader speed increases. Though the memory used are Samsung 1.0ns rated, which are running at 1800MHz and could do more.

ASUS has been using these very long boxes for their retail video cards for some time now and although they are a little awkward, they are less bulky than some other card boxes. The box does its job well, clearly noting what card it is and advertises that the card is overclocked and comes with an upgraded heat sink. It also shows that the card is PCI Express 2.0 and that it is HDCP ready. The bundle shipped with the card is a little above the norm for a value card. With a factory clock of 720MHz we cannot expect too much of an overclock without voltage tweaks, which is beyond the scope of this article.

We were able to reach 740MHz, a 20MHz boost on the core, with complete stability and 2080MHz on the memory, a 280MHz increase. While they are not big numbers it is easily attained and the heatsink has no problems handling the heat whatsoever. The ASUS GeForce 9600 GT TOP edition is obviously not the fastest card in NVIDIA's line up but that is not the goal. As of this writing, the ASUS GeForce 9600 GT is selling for $129 after a $20 rebate, which is an astounding value. You get a card with a great cooling, low noise heatsink, and an overclocked card for the same price as a reference model.

Though the performance differences weren't that large compared to the reference card the heatsink easily makes this card the top in its class. In the big picture we just saw the release of the GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260, two incredible performing cards, both with very large price tags. If the past couple of generations are anything to go by then it may be some while before we see the trickle down of that technology to this price point. And since the GT200 series are still most likely to undergo a die shrink first in the upcoming weeks, it might even take a but longer before the first mid-range series will be released.

For $130 this card is a steal for anyone not powering a huge flat panel. One thing we cannot rave enough about is the heatsink. It is very near silent and stays that way. The fan is running at full speed all of the time, no throttling up and down, and no big ramp up when you first boot the PC until the driver loads. It just has great cooling and very little noise.