Galaxy 9600GT Low Profile Low Power Review

Eye Candy:The Card Interior

Lets take off the cooler and see what the card looks like naked !

This card uses 8 GDDR3 memory chips, each is 64 MB. These are SAMSUNG K4J523240H-HJ1A rated at 1ns and good to work up to 1000MHz.

The heatsink is one large copper block having copper fins on the other side. The fan pushes air between these fins cooling the copper block and thus the GPU. As the air exits out of these fins, it passes over the aluminum heatsink covering the power phase inductors and MOSFETs. Thus the fan serves a dual purpose of cooling the the GPU and the power circuitry of the video card.

However it would have been better if the fan pushed the air the other way to exhaust out of the case. This might be a problem for people who might not have good cooling in their case.

Here is the close look at the stock thermal compound applied. Note that in the picture on the right the compound has dried off. It Looks like a pretty even application, covering the whole GPU. Some enthusiasts might even say that its too much.

Lets take a look at the power circuitry design of this card. After taking off the aluminum heatsink (seen in the background in the image on the left), it is clear that this card uses a 2+1 phase power circuit design (shown by the three large power inductors that say “1R0”) , each phase can supply a maximum of 30A. Each power inductor is connected to 3 MOSFETs (small black chips to right). There are a total of 9 MOSFETs – 6 on the front and 3 on the back of the PCB.

And now let’s take a look at the GPU itself.

All cleaned and shiny now, we see that this is a 55nm GPU(shown by the ending B1 on the codename). Perhaps all the “Green” Nvidia video cards make use of 55nm GPUs to achieve lower power consumption.