A Closer Look

The cooler is pretty simple but effective. A single heatpipe goes from the core around the fan blades. Some additional aluminum fins help with the heat transfer.


You may combine two GeForce 9500 GT cards to run in SLI for increased performance. Triple SLI configurations are not supported with this card. To the right of the SLI connector you can see the two pins for the SPDIF audio input for HDMI+Audio.


Even though a 6-pin PCI-Express power connector is present, it is not required for operation. The card draws all its power from the PCI-Express bus.
As I am told by Galaxy marketing, the additional power connector is just "a marketing gimmick for the Chinese market". On cards being sold outside of Asia the connector will be removed.


The GDDR3 chips are made by Samsung and have the model number K4J52324QE-BJ1A. They are rated for 1000 MHz (1.0 ns cycle time). These are the same memory chips you would find on more powerful models like the 9800 GTX+, for example.


This is NVIDIA's new G96 graphics processor. We are using revision C1 which is made in a 65nm process at TSMC using 314 million transistors. At a later date a smaller 55 nm variant will be revealed which is cheaper to make because the die size is smaller, also the heat output of such a chip would be slightly reduced.