A Closer Look

The cooler is the original Zalman VF1000 - just like you could buy it in a shop. What sets it apart is the metal plate displayed in the second picture. It helps stabilize the cooler on the card. Without it the heatpipes could bend easily if some weight is applied to the cooler which floats above the PCB being connected only to the GPU via heatpipe. This is a quite flimsy construction and could break under abuse. The metal plate costs next to nothing and makes the construction as sturdy as any "normal" VGA cooler.
I would also like to point out that there is absolutely no memory chip cooling, not even a heatspreader metal plate. While this won't be any problem at all for normal operation since there is the normal airflow from the fan around the memory chips, the memory overclock is limited by this.


One MAJOR I found on my board is that one of the four washers on the back which hold the cooler in place is dimensioned too big so it sits on top of a little capacitor nearby. When I disassembled the card I obviously didn't notice it, is it very hard to spot. After unscrewing the four screws and removing the cooler a tiny little capacitor was on the desk too. I wondered where the little bugger came from and started looking, it took me close to five minutes to find the location of the missing capacitor.


When I re-assembled the card I tried using different mounting holes which the Zalman cooler can do easily without any modification. Just screw out the two bottom posts and screw them in a bit closer to the GPU. The mounting holes fitting them are in the PCB already. As you can see there is lots of clearance now, so it is a possibility that the guys who assembled the cooler accidentally used the wrong mounting hole.
We notified VVIKOO of this and they are looking into the problem. The card I have works perfectly fine without the capacitor, so if you break this one off, try without it first, before you try to solder it back and cause more damage. Make sure you store the little capacitor in a safe place where you can get it in case you need it.


This card is compatible with SLI and can be paired with any other 9600 GT card. Above picture also shows where you connect the audio input from the motherboard for use with HDMI+Audio.


The power connector on the back is required to supply power to the card. It is also required when running in PCI-E 2.0 mode, which would be able to supply all power over the bus.


Like on all current NVIDIA cards, GDDR3 is used. The Samsung chips carry the model number K4J52324QE-BJ1A. Even though they have 1.0 ns latency (= 1000 MHz) we saw a stable memory overclock of close to 1100 MHz.


This is NVIDIA's new G94 GPU, which is made at TSMC in a 65 nm process with 505 million transistors.