First thing you’ll notice about this card is the size of the card. It is a two-slot video card, meaning that you need a PCI Express x16 slot and an adjacent free slot to install it in a system. Replacing the normal fan/heatsink combination that is found on most video cards is replaced by a massive heatpipe solution called Multi-Core cooling.

Multi-Core cooling is a 3 point cooling solution that covers the graphics chip, the front of the video card by the IO and has a heatpipe that runs throughout the three points of the cooling solution. Gigabyte says that this solution can cool the graphics chip over 7 degrees Celsius lower than a regular fan solution. Note, that the manual for the graphics card says that normal temperatures should be maintained to ensure proper operation of the Silent cooling system.

The rear of the card has a mounting bracket for the graphics chip. Most video cards have a 4 corner mounting bracket that can be very light. Due to the Multi-Core Cooling solution that this card uses, a heavier mounting bracket is used to hold the solution in place. Also on the back of the card are stickers for the Serial number and FCC Compliance stickers.

The IO area of the card is different than most boards with the heatsink of the Multi-Core cooling system is on the bracket area instead of behind the bracket. This ensures that heat gets transferred out of the system and a natural airflow of the cooling system. There are two Dual-Link DVI connections on the board, allowing it to run dual DVI monitors, dual CRT monitors with adapters or any combination of the two. There’s also a TV-Out connector allowing the card to be attached to a HDTV.

NVIDIA has recently released a PhysX driver for their GeForce 9xxx series cards and newer, and that means that the Gigabyte 9600GT video card will be able to run PhysX games and demos with the new driver. While some call offloading the Physics to the graphics card cheating in benchmarks, the truth is that it is the same thing as offloading the geometry calculations from the CPU to the HW T+L unit on the original GeForce cards back in 2000. It’s a feature, not a cheat. Nonetheless, due to the controversy all tests will be run with the latest NVIDIA Forceware without PhysX.