To give a quick refresh on the GeForce 9600 GT it is based off the 65nm G92 GPU from Nvidia with 64 stream processors, a 256-bit memory bus, a standard core clock of 650MHz and memory at 900MHz with 512MB of RAM. This is 58 less stream processors than the next graphics card up, the GeForce 8800 GT. The card requires one PCI-Express power adapter, features two DVI outputs, and a video out.

What's unique about the Asus GeForce 9600 GT Top is the large what Asus are dubbing "Glaciator" heatsink. This sits in the middle of the card and features a much larger fan than standard 9600 GTs which actually keeps it very quiet as well. This allows Asus to give overclock the card out of the box to 720MHz for the core and 1GHz for the memory. What we've seen from benchmarking so far is that clock speed seems to matter more than the number of stream processors as the 9600 GT is very competitive with the 8800 GT despite quite a few less stream processors so this is a good development for the 9600 GT.

Inside the box Asus includes a molex-to-PCI-E power adapter, DVI-to-VGA adapter, DVI-to-HDMI adapter, component video cable, S/PDIF cable, and a leather CD booklet. No extra software included here besides the drivers but few extra perks for the hardware bundle.

Here are the technical specs.

Graphics Engine: NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT
Bus Standard: PCI Express 2.0
Video Memory: DDR3 512MB
Engine Clock: 720 MHz
Shader Clock: 1800 MHz
Memory Clock: 2GHz effective (1 GHz DDR3)
Memory Interface: 256-bit
DVI Max Resolution: 2560 x 1600
D-Sub Output: Yes x 1 (via DVI to D-Sub adapter x 1)
DVI Output: Yes x 2 (DVI-I)
HDMI Output: Yes x 1 (via DVI to HDMI adapter x 1)
HDTV Output (YPbPr): Yes
HDCP Support: Yes
TV Output: Yes (S-Video to Composite)
Software Bundled: ASUS Utilities & Driver
The card size is 4.376 inches x 9 inches

Here is our current test system.

Our test OS was Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 with Nvidia's 175.12 of Forceware drivers and ATI Catalyst 8.4. All the latest software revisions were used in our testing.

The overclocked 9600 GT bests the overclocked Radeon 3870 that is until one gets to 1920x1200 in which it comes in just a hair under.

Unreal Tournament 3 shows better results for the 9600 GT Top scoring a very nice 54fps at 2560x1600.

Quake Wars is one of the last Open GL games on the market but something we think is worth testing. Nvidia has always done better in Open GL and this game is no different as the top scores quite excellently.

Episode 2 isn't very demanding at even HD resolutions so we only tested at 2560x1600. The 9600 GT Top isn't much slower than the 9800 GTX.

3DMark is a synthetic benchmark but very popular to see hardware potential. Things are more even across the board here.

Overclocking we were able to get a nice boost to 770MHz for the core and 1.15GHz for the memory which yielded about an extra 7%.