Just when we thought we would no longer receive any more GeForce 9600 GT's because we figured we'd have checked just about every single one on the market, ASUS has decided to run around and release a new one. The particular card we're looking at today is part of the Republic of Gamers collection, which is something we tend to see more in the motherboard department. It makes a lot of sense, though, that ASUS are going to expand this popular naming scheme out to more than just motherboards. This new card comes to us as the Extreme N9600 GT Matrix. Matrix is also something we haven't heard of from ASUS before, so it will be interesting to see if they're starting new lines. - TweakTown

ASUS Extreme N9600 GT Matrix Edition Card Review

We're seeing ASUS carry the new smaller box design over to the mid-range cards which is good to see. The whole box layout has a pretty funky silver and black color scheme going on with a picture of a girl taking up the right side of the box. Across the top of the box we have the ASUS logo while across the bottom we have the model along with the Republic of Gamers logo. Just above the model we have mention that the card comes with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, HDMI and iTracker. In the middle of the box we have a picture of the card along with the mention of Hybrid cooler and engine advantage.

Upon pulling the card out of the box, you realize how different the cooler is to anything we've seen before. It's very similar to the older higher end coolers with the fan sitting towards the back of the card and pushing cool air across the core and going out the back of the system. It's got a lot of aluminum with a heatsink and heatpipe going around the fan, another heatsink towards the front of the card and some heatpipes coming out the top of the card and moving back into the cooler. The top is also aluminum, which is nice as initially when looking at pictures we thought it would be plastic.

Looking around the card, there isn't anything that we haven't seen before. Sitting on the black PCB towards the back of the card we have a single 6-pin PCI Express connector. Moving across the top of the card, we have a single SLI connector. While the Extreme N9600 GT Matrix might sound like it's going to be an overclocked card thanks to its impressive cooler and feature set, it's not. It carries the stock 650MHz core, 1625MHz shader clock and 1800MHz effective memory clock on the 512MB of included GDDR3 memory. ASUS has managed add a few nice little tweaks to the card to make it stand out compared to other.

The cooler does a good job of keeping the card cool and it's also nice to see that the promise of less power comes true with the ASUS Matrix using less power than the reference designed GeForce 9600 GT. Furthermore, even with the same clocks, the ASUS card is able to outperform the reference GeForce 9600 GT consistently under a number of tests. If that wasn't enough for you, the fact that ASUS have then thrown on an optical out port alongside the HDMI one makes the card a perfect choice for people who want something that can do a bit of gaming while giving the best possible image quality on your home theater PC.

All in all, there isn't a whole lot to complain about with the particular video card. It would have been nice to see it come to the market a little earlier, but like they say, better late than never. Now, hopefully we see more graphics cards come in under the Republic of Gamers naming scheme. It will be also interesting to see if we see the Matrix naming scheme pop up again in future releases, be it from AMD or NVIDIA.